Microsoft Office Mobile arrives for iOS
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Microsoft is clearly aware that most people with a tablet already have something by Apple or an Android device and that trying to use Office to sell them a Windows RT device isn't going to work.
However enticing organizations to "upgrade" to Office 365 (which comes with a regular subscription fee and better long term profits) to get a version for the tablet they already have might actually move some 365-licenses.
I say they are making the best of the situation.
If I see an application that is $50, I can quickly quantify that into hours I need to work for this to be paid off. I can compare the value I am getting to the amount of currency that I expend on it. I know that if I need to in the future, it will always be there for me to rely on.
If I see a service that is $12 a month it becomes a much harder game. Sure it might be worth it for the first month, but the second one becomes a much harder decision. Do I unsubscribe, and lose all the data that I have stores, or do I pay another $12 and hope that it continues to be useful to me in the future? In the future I might need to sign up again, which is a lot more hassle than it is worth.
All of these "small" subscriptions are beginning to cost me more than I'd like.
It used to be software. You buy it for $50 or whatever and use it. Now they are transitioning to a service model where you pay $40/year/user forever.
Their reasoning was transparent: they aren't selling enough perpetual licenses. I get that, but it's annoying to me
Office is actually a great product and Excel in particular still is the best available spreadsheet around. But Office has been hamstrung by being part of Microsoft; in particular by not supporting iOS or Android or online (until being forced to). If Office was its own company, I'm sure these platforms would have been supported years ago.
I feel like Microsoft is one of the rare cases where the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.
You could argue the same thing with Apple and iOS. iOS would be better if it weren't so tied to OS X, but I'm not sure the rest of Apple would be in anywhere near the same position (or even still around) if it weren't for the big iOS and iPod cashcows.
Why is that?
1. If people could develop for it on other platforms it would significantly increase the number of people able to write iOS apps globally, particularly people from lower socio-economic groups. In the short term it doesn't make a big difference, but there are millions of people in India and China that can't afford even an entry level Mac, and I think in the long run this is detrimental to the ecosystem.
2. Many iOS services are tied into the Apple ecosystem, such as messages, notes, facetime etc. If they weren't using iOS to try to get people onto OSX then these services would be more likely to be cross platform and therefore far more useful.
I wish Apple cared for OS X that much.
It would probably be great for consumers if these companies took the attitude of making their products work best in a full stack, but still play nicely with everyone else's products, but they seem believe (rightly or wrongly) that it is in their own best interest to push for vertical integration and implicit or explicit lock-in.
Apple and iOS isnt really comparable because the integration between the two is possible only because they are both from the same vendor. In that particular example, its adds value to both products, which is the opposite of the dynamic between Office and Windows, where the value is decreased.
Usually when a company offers a wide range of products that work especially well together, that's a good thing, but somehow Microsoft has ended up crippling themselves. Even from a purely nontechnical marketing perspective, it seems like every single thing that they've made that has had "Windows" in the product name that was not the OS itself (Windows Phone being a prime example), has suffered from the association.
I feel like Windows Phone could have been much more successful if they had just called it something else. It also seems like Xbox may have been much less successful if they were required to call it Windows Box or WindowsTV or whatever. It's just a dumb marketing thing that has nothing to do with technical details of the product, but it makes a huge different in how potential customers view that product.
The cash helped make that possible.
On the downside, it's a shame the Microsoft Courier tablet was killed just before the iPad was released.
They dont innovate, they attack and poison the well. I really dont understand why stockholders put up with jungle boy acting out like that. I whish Nicrosoft would just focus on its wn products and profitability, but i doubt Ballmer will ever be a big enough man to take that road.
Android spreadsheets which are Excel compatible are something I am interested in. There's a few options - Documents To Go, Quickoffice, Olive Office...
Two years ago I started to write a spreadsheet which could handle Excel format on Android without network access. I used the Apache POI libraries. I could handle pre-2007 Excel files OK (XLS), but post-2007 (XLSX) was more of a challenge. I learned the hard way of Android's famous 2^16 methods per Dalvik executable file limit while doing the project, and discovery of the existence of that limitation put the project on an indefinite hiatus. I tried to get around the problem - I pulled a lot out of the schema but it was still over the 65536 method limit. One option available would be custom class loading of multiple Dex files, which would be a pain. Another possibility is some kind of cloud solution where XLSX files would be uploaded to a server - something I have little interest in.
The remnants of my project are here - http://bit.ly/1abDbhK - although there is not much there, just a very, very bare skeleton of a spreadsheet which can handle XLS (pre-2007 Excel) files. I have to update the README though since the API of the Apache POI libraries have changed - it still works with the archived and still downloadable, circa-June-2011 POI libraries though.
Does it? The people that I've known to try this have all complained to me about problems. Not sure if this is a compatibility issue or Pages itself (and not sure if it's just my small sample of friends).
I'd say Keynote<-->PPT is the best of the bunch, followed by Pages<->Word. VBA Excel macros are hard to port.
They have always allowed Windows to run in a VM on Linux - it's just the special free VM packages that didn't run on Linux before.
They have also always had Office on Mac - it's the best way to make sure no other office suite can get off the ground, and makes Office documents more industry standard.
If they were to release Office for Linux, then that would be something.
I'm happy with Gimp for image manipulation and indie games (I've got a 3DS and a Windows partition on my desktop for that), but I still boot into Windows or fire up a VM on my laptop to run MS Office (or watch Netflix).
Microsoft building Office for Linux would be a complete waste of time and money. The majority of Linux users would complain that it was expensive, closed source, and continue using the free, open alternatives.
I don't know what you're user base you're sampling but the vast majority of Linux users are not opposed to closed source ( Steam, VMWare, Humble Bundle ) and are quite willing to pay for quality software.
For example, if you just read the most popular Linux forums, you could easily get the impression that every single Linux user despises Ubuntu with every fiber in the fabric of their being, and that they would never use any closed source product under any circumstances, and that they would only consider paying for anything if what they were paying was itself 100% open source.
As far as I can tell, though, that's not necessarily the case at all, with the Steam/VMWare/Humble Bundle cases being well-known counterexamples. As far as I can tell, nobody really knows. The Humble Bundle cases are interesting because Linux users have historically paid more than users from other platforms, on average, but is that because most Linux users want more closed source Linux software, or is it because a subset of Linux users want to encourage more closed source, and are voting with their wallets to demonstrate that?
Anyway, nobody knows. But if you are correct that the vast majority of Linux users are not opposed to closed source, then that would imply that pretty much the entire online Linux community is a hugely disproportionate misrepresentation of Linux users as a whole. Given that Linux as a platform is far more reliant on having a healthy online community than other platforms, that would be a big problem. However, my gut feeling is that you are correct, and that the online Linux community is a vastly disproportionate subset of Linux users, and that it's unfortunate that the online community is so dominated by one particular type of user.
I don't think Microsoft building Office for Linux would be a waste at all. Photoshop, Office and Steam games are the big three I see from Linux users complaining about a lack of software. Not all Linux users are fanatical about free software. The question is - what is more important to Microsoft, Office ubiquity or keeping corporates on Windows?
The process will be much more reliable on an official MS set of apps, and for many companies that's worth a lot of money.
It's not a huge pain, it's straightforward; and you can render to PDF as well if you're concerned about appearance.
Microsoft actually makes some decent iOS apps. A company of 100k will have different groups with different beliefs/approaches. It's like the thread earlier this week about a particular person's experience with the group he was in after 8mo.
Not rocket growth but the trend clearly points to MS being the weak #3.
Not sure how the existing install base for both effects this conclusion. Sales are only 1 piece of the puzzle.
http://news.cnet.com/Apple-launches-iTunes-for-Windows/2100-...
Seems pretty in-budget for a student.