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Comment by kvb | Hacker News Reader

Is the argument that a touch version of Office is more important than a web-friendly version? Moving to a JavaScript-based add-in model and adding native support for SkyDrive seem like fairly big, worthwhile, and forward-looking additions to me. In contrast, I don't think that touch-friendliness is really very important - it would be nice to have, but I doubt most office workers are going to be doing a lot of editing on tablets.

There are also plenty of nice new features too, like flash-fill in Excel and PDF reading in Word. I really think Office 2013 is a nice, if not critical, update.

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They've certainly used Office as a major selling point of Surface RT. So there's at least some conflict in the message they are sending there. Is Office meant for tables or not? If yes, then why haven't they made it more touch optimized? If not, then why are they making such a big deal out of it with Surface promotion?

And don't think you're getting Office for "free" in there anyway. The hardware specs are almost identical to a $200 Nexus 7. There's little in there, hardware wise, that could justify a $300 increase. So obviously most of the difference is to pay up for the Windows and Office licenses. They are included in the price. they are not "free".

The answer is pretty plain: The Office division cut the team that was supposed to ship the Metro-styled Office apps for 2013 despite the Windows division objection. Windows then relented and added 'desktop mode' for ARM just to keep Office in the release. Office tweaked the existing UI to make buttons 'bigger.' The original plan called for the Metro UI to be available whenever a user interacted with his hands -- Surface was the primary objective, but Office 2013 should work great on the Toshiba tablet as well.

The decision to cut Metro support was made in Q1 2011 and distributed to all Office managers by Kurt himself. The team that was working on Metro (called Modern Office eXperience, MOX) shrunk and merged with OneNote. Hence, why we see OneNote has Metro and no other app does. The reasoning was "the Win8 APIs are not stable enough for us to finish on schedule with the team we have. We either ship 10/11/12 or slip by a year to support Windows 8." They decided to ship (RTM) on 10/11/12. We should see a 'surprise' SP1 that supports Metro and iOS by the end of this year (this is pure speculation from me -- I have no NDA knowledge about plans past 10/11/12).

You are seeing a classical "ship the orgchart" dilema from Microsoft with Office and Windows this season. It's sad, really, but these tensions are why I don't work there.

Shipping WinRT support for all of Office within a year sounds aggressive if it was only OneNote at the end of Office 2013!

I wonder why MS did not make Win8 on ARM fully open to desktop apps like NT on Alpha was.

Is the Surface really a tablet? From the marketing, it seems clear that the presence of a semi-integrated keyboard is considered a selling point, so I'm not sure there's really much of a conflict here.

As an owner of both devices, I don't think that the Surface hardware is really all that comparable to the Nexus 7. Aside from the obvious size difference, the build quality is vastly better on the Surface, it has a rear camera, it has a USB 2 port that can be used to charge other devices or attach a wide variety of peripherals, etc. Whether that's worth what they're charging is another question, of course.

Office workers are going to do a lot of work on tablets, but the work they will do on tablets mightn't fit into the Microsoft Office paradigm.

For example, when it comes to meeting minutes, Microsoft Word doesn't stack up well against Evernote.

Sure, but that's what OneNote is for (and there's a touch-optimized OneNote app). The current weak touch support is still good enough to do basic editing on tablets, and is definitely fine for viewing. Touch-optimized interfaces for all parts of the suite would be nice, but I find it hard to fault the Office team's prioritization.

I personally feel that OneNote is vastly superior to Evernote.

With the Web version going to have an update every 3 months, I think setting up the foundation would have been higher priority. The improvements will keep coming in I hope.

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