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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

It's in the best interest of Office to be on every platform possible. It's in the best interest of Windows for Office to be an exclusive. That's the tension that's been there for years.

But Office, especially with its growing Web and sharing underpinnings, may be a more enduring product than Windows. If this is indeed the case, it makes sense for Office to be on every platform possible, making it the standard for document creation and sharing.

Microsoft is weak in the smartphone and tablet space. It makes a ton of sense for Office to go here; it's not like strong Office products on iOS would hurt Surface sales. And now with subscription plans and Windows becoming less ubiquitous, why not Linux?

It's not Office's job to protect Windows, especially if Windows can't protect Office. If Office doesn't go on more platforms, people will switch to other solutions because they are using non-Windows devices all the time. Windows alone will kill Office in the long term.

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I don't see where this whole "Windows is becoming less ubiquitous" is coming from. Maybe market share has dropped a bit, but, Microsoft still rules the basically the whole desktop market.

Sometimes in the startup world with all the glowing Apple logos, we lose sense of the rest of the world (heck, even the rest of the United States).

I'm referring to operating systems as a whole. People are spending less time using Windows devices and more time using smartphones and tablets. I'd love to use Office with syncing on my iPad, but that's not an option, so I have to find other ways to do these tasks. OS X market share is growing, but that's not what I'm referring to.

Ten years ago, almost everyone's computing time was spent on Windows. Now even people who use Windows desktops/laptops have iPads, Android phones, etc.

That makes sense.

If you're in US, you could use OnLive Desktop for Office on tablets.

That's a workaround, and a US-only one so, for those who are very, very eager to run Office.

It's not a natural first option for writing documents if you're on a device which already has Google Docs, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office or anything like that.

In fact, most people will probably never even consider it an option. At least not until Microsoft provides a native version of Office for their preferred procrastination platform.

And kids growing up these days spend more (most?) of their time on mobile devices, running iOS or Android, or when on a laptop, 99% of the time in a browser.

The time when people grew up and learnt Microsoft by default is definitely over. These days you can actually grow up, learn computers and internet without ever once using Microsoft software. It's not that far fetched.

This is Microsoft's problem. They can no longer claim to be the one default everyone knows, uses and are familiar with (and hence prefer).

I've never visited San Franscisco & seen this 'start-up world' you speak of, but the widespread use of Macs surprises me a bit. In all my IRL interactions with developers, it's always free software variants of *nix with a minority of Macs. I guess I interact with the FOSS/Security/Privacy community a lot though. I guess if your customers use them it's good to use them.

One word: smartphones

Linux usage is rising. Microsoft rules yet, but it's already losing ground.

As per statistics... Mac OS is rising faster than Linux. No doubt Windows is ruler in this market but soon Mac OS and Linux will gain good market share..

> Maybe market share has dropped a bit

This is the definition of "becoming less ubiquitous". It doesn't have to mean they're falling apart and about to be irrelevant, they just have less of a market share than they did

Just the be clear, market share != install base. Market share is basically the percentage of new computers being sold (presumably limited to desktop computers).

Things to note:

- This could just mean that sales of new Windows computers fell relative to computers with other operating systems, but the sales of Windows computers in absolute numbers still grew.

- This could mean Window users are buying fewer new computers, but Apple users are more prone to upgrade their computers to get the next new shiny model (or upgrade to escape some Rev 1.0 issues that Apple refuses to acknowledge/fix).

Actually the opposite is true, apparently Mac users keep their computers for much longer than Windows users. A key reason is probably the price of a new Mac, another that time and OS upgrades generally don't make a Mac much slower (the exception being Lion). Many Windows PCs are simply thrown away because it's cheaper for a non-techie to buy a new one than to reinstall the OS an all their apps.

In the early 2000's, I knew a number of people that would upgrade every cycle or so by reselling their old Mac and buying the shiny new one.

Inflection points and mind share.

Microsoft no longer has the mind share of either the public or the development community. The "cool kids" tend not to develop on MS platforms these days by choice. Look at Jeff Atwood, he was a prominant asp.net mvc dev (stackoverflow) and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse). This trend is all the more troublesome because C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?

Also, look at Microsoft's big pushes, bing and winphone 7+. Both have been at best partial successes, and they need more than that for a company their size.

The exact moment in time that is the biggest problem for a company facing potential decline like Microsoft is not when they have ceded the majority of marketshare to a competitor, nor is it when their revenues and marketshare being to contract. The key moment is the inflection point in their growth rate, when the 2nd derivative turns from positive to negative. That's the point where if nothing is done then eventually the peak will be reached and decline will set in. That's the point where there is still the opportunity to turn things around, it's the point where the resources are still available and the least work needs to be done to make a change.

>C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?

Great times for Xamarin.

As an iOS developer, I'm interested in Windows Phone. In my past I programmed a bit with the .NET API's (mainly VB, later on a little bit of C#). I've recently dabbled in Android, and personally I don't like the tooling (Eclipse, emulator slow).

Just last week I downloaded the MonoTouch toolkit and will experiment a bit with creating a multi-platform (iOS / Android) app with a partially shared codebase in C#. So far I like the following things about the MonoTouch toolkit:

a) UIKit methods / classes are called more or less the same. Don't need to look up the API much.

b) from what I understand, it should be possible to create my own wrappers around Obj-C (iOS) or Java (Android) objects.

c) Create optimised user interfaces for each platform. This is the part where the code will differ mostly.

d) MonoDevelop is a nice, though somewhat sparse / limited IDE. I really hate the future creep of Eclipse and imo Visual Studio could also use a little trimming in the UI - otherwise a fine product though. I love Xcode.

Yup, and I found C# versions of UIKit classes more convenient to code against.

Regarding your point about MonoDevelop, I won't spill the beans but Xamarin is preparing something exciting to fix IDE problems right now.

>and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse).

Fwiw he went with Rails for Discourse because the entire stack has to be both free as in beer, and Free as in liberty, since it's competing against phpbb and the like, which are both f/Free and good enough for most people.

For Discourse to take off in the way he wants it to, he can't risk relying on better features to compensate for cost differential, he has to eliminate cost differential.

If he were building another SO or closed-source SaaS product, asp.net mvcc would probably still be an option.

I would have thought that the primary users of Office are the corporate world. Large companies use Windows, and will continue to use Windows for at least the next decade. Fashionable development may have mind share, but corporate practice isn't particularly fashionable. Corporate licenses must make up a huge proportion of office income.

Apple's made no real moves to become more corporate friendly in the desktop space (and things like their recent blocking of Java definitely won't help them) and Linux on the corporate desktop is miles away from adoption (some public bodies which did adopt it have moved back to Windows).

People talk about the new era of tablet computing, but tablets are pretty much useless for a lot of typing-heavy work. Perhaps eventually a descendant of the tablet (perhaps something like the chromebook) will start to dislodge windows for lighter-weight corporate usage, but I believe it'll be a long time coming. Most large companies have piles of weird internal web-based tools which can't deal with touch, perhaps run on Java or Flash or depend on IE6 technologies, and the slow and cumbersome process of replacing them will take an age.

I don't think it's so much tablets that are the problem. It's that programs are steadily being replaced with platform-agnostic managed things like web services. Maybe we're not there with Office yet, but once you're at the point that Office is the only primary anchor holding you to Windows, it's a pretty big target for someone else to move in.

Tablets are fine for typing-heavy work, just use a bluetooth keyboard with the tablet on a stand. This mode of operation isn't common yet, but that's because tablets are still relatively new.

Edit: to clarify, right now we're at a point where it's rare for a tablet (or smartphone) to be someone's primary or only computing device, but as they become more popular that will increasingly be the case, and then people will develop new habits and new modes of use to fit these devices into their work or their lives. Meaning that if people are using them at work then they'll tend to have some way to use a physical keyboard with them for the times when an onscreen keyboard won't cut it.

Small caveat: I do think MSSQL is one of the best DB server engines I have used. It's a pity it only runs on Windows.

> I don't see where this whole "Windows is becoming less ubiquitous"is coming from.

In 2012Q3, 122 million Android devices were sold http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57549482-94/smartphone-sale...

Over the same time period, about 75 million PCs and laptops were sold, mostly running Windows.

Android is already beating Windows in terms of rate at which devices are shipped running it. If people start using Android devices for more stuff, and consequently use Windows devices less, Microsoft is in big trouble.

But the issue here is that you are comparing fundamentally different pieces of technology, and yes, yes, a smart phone is a computer too, but I don't see anyone using them for general purpose computing right now and to be honest, I don't see it any time in the future.

Go in to any office, literally, any office, and you won't find anyone working on an iPad or their Samsung Galaxy, they will be working on a PC or a laptop, most likely running Windows and for the most part they are happy with it.

Comparing the sales of Windows against the sales of Android is like comparing the sales of Toasters against the sales of Microwaves, sure, they might be at some level similar appliances but they are used for completely different reasons.

A smartphone is used for consumption, it is a luxury most people have or aspire to have and while the PC or Laptop may fall in to that department at home, in the office, they are used for creation (except from when we are bored of course...) and for the foreseeable future, that's how things will remain until the space is completely "disrupted" (whatever that means.)

I'm going to put it like this, I don't live in Silicone Valley, I live in a small town in the north of the UK, and every person I know and who's house I have been to. Every single one has both a smart phone and a PC, that's not just me saying it, that's every single person.

The reason why the numbers are so different is something crucial and so simple that we always seem to overlook it:

Normal people[1] only need one computer for their home and they share it, but they want to be in contact with their family via phones at all times, and the kids these days don't want a Nokia 3310, they want the newest, most expensive model, because they are COOL.

You can attribute it to whatever merely visible swing in the market you want to, but that is the simple truth.

[1] - By which I mean people who aren't in the tech industry.

You're missing something big here: Software support. In the past it was completely reasonable to develop all your stuff Win-only. Hence the lock-in, hence the market share. Nowadays, even in forward looking big corps, when new software projects are planned, Android and iOS support is usually not only considered but a priority. That's why we see more and more software becoming POSIX compatible. And once this is all done, the OS becomes completely interchangable, at which point MS looses big time, they basically loose their long time business model of domination through Windows market share.

Once this transition has been completed, MS will become a Software company like all the others, they won't have any home turf advantage anymore.

For this reason I'm very skeptical whether MS will allow the Office port. It would basically show that they have accepted their fate (which would be a good sign for their management however).

Thanks for writing this up. Too often I hear the numbers quoted in sales and think this exact thing. How often do you buy a PC? Every 3 years or so (probably more for most families)? A phone though.. Every 2? The price points of phones and tablets allow a total upgrade a lot quicker than a desktop/laptop.

"A smartphone is used for consumption" is just a bad generalization. Is making calls, sending emails and text messages "consumption"? No. And for tablets it's an even worse generalization. But still, _most_ computer usage _is_ consumption! And most of it that is not (like word processing) can be done by attaching a keyboard to a tablet. The office workers that actually need a workstation (like graphics designers, engineers and programmers) is only a small fraction of the workforce that uses a computer today. Business use is one thing (and changes there always happen a a glacial pace). But my parents and my girlfriend now rarely uses their PC.

They either use a tablet, or their smartphone if the tablet isn't nearby! So the key here is convenience, which incidentally is why the laptop became so popular in the consumer market. When that PC dies, they will take a hard look at whether they really need to replace it.

> And most of it that is not (like word processing) can be done by attaching a keyboard to a tablet. The office workers that actually need a workstation (like graphics designers, engineers and programmers) is only a small fraction of the workforce that uses a computer today

The fraction of worldwide workforce that sits in an office doing work that requires both a keyboard and a screen larger than 10" includes about any office-person whose actual output is not just talking...

I agree with you that this seems silly. But Microsoft itself seems to buy it. Why have they created a "mobile" interface for Windows 8 that annoys desktop users? And now Office for Linux. That's a surprise.

Windows is everywhere, but Microsoft only gets money when they sell a new version. New computers are cheaper and cheaper, so they have to lower Windows price also.

With Windows 8, it seems Microsoft itself is ready to bury the desktop. It's a tremendous mistake, but MS has a long history of completely failing to recognize trends.

The mobile market is enormous and MS missed it (so far), but the desktop/laptop market isn't going away any time soon and they seem to be missing that, too.

Windows is a good desktop environment for the most part. But by trying to make Windows a monolith on all platforms, they seem to be rushing towards making it suboptimal for all platforms and ceding a market they are the undisputed owner of. Or maybe the mass of computer users will just accept Windows 8 as the new normal and put up with it no matter how much they hate it. After all, they've been doing that with Office for 20 years.

Okay, I just wandered the halls of my company, a privately held insurance/financial services company.

Most of us drones are issued standard Windows desktops or notebooks. But the story is far different in the VP suites. Many of them have iPads with keyboards. They use them, love them for meetings etc.

This has driven our company to find more and more ways to support them, since when a VP says "Support my device" things often happen.

Eventually this will trickle down to us unwashed masses, and we'll be able to use iOS and Android without having to suffer with Citrix Receiver.

Anectdata is fun...

It will, but it will take a long time, I think that's what the grandparent is saying. The VP doesn't care what the people 2 floors down in their cubes are using, so they'll continue to use the safe, cheap choice until Windows is no longer the safe cheap choice for office work.

Actually, when the VP mandates that any web app he purchases support iOS and Android, it trickles down pretty quickly.

Angry Birds is already on iOS and Android.

A lot of people are still getting their first smartphone. They already have a Windows laptop or desktop at home. Also, desktops and laptops tend to last longer (for regular users, I'd suggest around 3-5 years) than a smartphone (lifespan of which is usually about 2 years, after which you're upgraded). Finally, a smartphone is "free". Well, not really, but it can certainly feel like it - you can go into a store, pay nothing up front and walk out with a £600 smartphone. People tend to pay up front for desktops and laptops, however.

There were also more loaves of bread sold than window machines in 2012Q3.

Oh, sorry, I thought we were just comparing unrelated things to 'prove' Microsoft is in trouble...

They do, but large companies are no longer investing in the Wintel PC + Windows. Windows 8 trepedation will put the nail in the coffin, as Enterprise IT is afraid of Windows 8, and the key new PC form factors (Ultrabook, Tablet) are going to require it.

So companies are looking at landing Windows 7 in Citrix and VMWare VDI environments. This is scary for Microsoft, as both companies are looking at breaking up the Windows platform into layers, and injecting their own platform tools.

Microsoft needs a landing place for Office that isn't completely controlled by VMWare/Citrix, which is the true cash cow now that the OS is becoming commoditized. So they are finally investing in VDI with Server 2012, and supporting Office via HTTP and alternate platforms.

If you think about 1983 vs. 2013, VDI is the green screen, and tablets are the PCs.

I think the parent has a point. The thing that would stop 90% of business users from being able to use Linux is Microsoft Office.

In the past several years, I've come to believe that Office is a much more potent monopoly than Windows itself. Of course, I also think Office is a blight on the software world and the sooner it dies, the better for everyone, but that's another topic.

The fact is, Microsoft can only maintain the status quo (and this has been true for the better part of two decades) by milking their monopoly so it makes great business sense to get Office on as many platforms as possible.

I imagine this wouldn't be happening if Android weren't around, but this move would allow a lot of people to migrate to Linux and remain with Microsoft Office, and I suspect that's exactly what will happen for a lot of folks.

Let's face it. No one wants Windows 8, and a lot of people would choose an alternative but the elephant in the room has always been Office. I'm all for supporting competitors to Office, but they will continue to fight an uphill battle against an entrenched and corrupt foe who does everything in its power to undermine competition, DoJ notwithstanding.

Given that people are not so much abandoning Windows for other choices on the desktop, but many are abandoning the desktop itself - Windows is essentially non-existent in the mobile market and its success in the tablet realm remains to be seen - this is another reason Microsoft should make this move.

There's a tipping point where non-Windows operating systems gain enough of a foothold that they will create enough demand to incentivize compelling non-Microsoft Office solutions.

For iOS, we've passed that point, and I believe that Microsoft is afraid of passing that point for Linux in the enterprise.

If a decent alternative to Office gains significant traction on Linux in the enterprise then Microsoft loses significant Windows and Office revenue. If providing Office for Linux staves off the competition then it can at least preserve the Office revenues.

On the desktop - a consistently good experience with a common application/document format is key. The assorted office options seriously lack in many ways -- both in usability and feature compatibility.

I prefer to look at this as, Office is seeing the desktop as becoming a diverse platform, so being more available benefits Office. Linux and OSX are becoming more accepted as compute options in a number of large companies where Windows once ruled.

Office 365 for the cloud, another step towards ubiquity.

Will it work? Who knows. But being open to adapting to changes in platform demographics is important in the application space.

I can see Office 365 possibly being supported on the Linux desktop but I will eat my hat if we see desktop Office on desktop Linux. There's hardly a market there, why would they bother?

The tension exists because Windows is what made Microsoft into the company it is, but Office is the product that truly drove Microsoft's profit. Eventually, the money has to win out. It's unnatural for it to not to.

Office for Android could be pretty potent, but also extremely damaging to the Windows ecosystem.

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