Microsoft Office Online
office.com
office.com
This is nothing new, per se, just a launcher page that lets you directly access each of the web apps instead of having to launch the apps from inside Skydrive's file explorer.
We also just heard about Chrome OS pushing Microsoft to cut the price of Windows licenses for low-end laptops. Plus we have Nokia (soon to be Microsoft's smartphone division) releasing low-end handsets based on Android.
These may all be reasonable strategic choices (I tend to think they're at least heading in the right direction), but put the picture together and it looks like Microsoft has been pushed into playing Google's game according to Google's rules. That usually doesn't end well.
Yes, but it was belated when this was released 4 years ago.
I have been a happy subscriber to the $99 version (with OS apps) and I have been very happy with the price point. Have pretty much moved over to OneNote from EverNote over the past year and also love the ability to have a local install of Excel, but be able to edit inline on the web when needed.
The subscription model you are thinking of is called Microsoft Office 365 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_365).
And when you use it, Microsoft will be able to track what you do, just like Google does! And we all know that those big bad corporations just can't be trusted. Except for Microsoft, of course.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57613803-71/microsofts-lat...
Wow you have no idea how happy that makes me as a OneNote user since 2006 or so. It's my favorite part of Office.
Hopefully one day...
They could even implement a differential update mechanism, just encrypt the deltas before uploading. (After careful review, since that might introduce some sort of crypto weakness.) I'd even be satisfied if some of the metadata wasn't encrypted.
Otherwise, I don't feel comfortable in having a detailed, personal, life journal. I want something I could access from various devices and record internal thoughts, while minimizing the possibility of anyone including close friends, getting access.
OneNotes default appears to be "hey, we'll drop this, unencrypted, in your Live sign-in default storage".
And then EFS on top of that, and each VM has its own encryption as well. So even a full compromise won't hurt the VMs I'm not using at the time.
But it doesn't help since OneNote's online slick-access-from-anywhere, doesn't do crypto AFAIK. So all my transparent crypto protect my local device, but OneLook uploads the notebooks unencrypted to SkyDrive.
The biggest win, I think is the internal "e drive" encryption, so that a RAM dump doesn't spill keys. That even somewhat mitigates Lightning DMA attacks. (Although the attacker could just hijack the OS at that point.)
It has just enough features without feeling heavy to suit our needs.
So millions of people probably have a deal that's even better than what you're asking for.
I wonder how long it will be until essentially all software is free, and all the services are run more or less at cost (as the economists would put it, they can earn profits, just not economic profits). But in the long run, as they say, we're all dead ;)
It's quite probable, of course, that software in the general case is prone to market inefficiencies, especially in the short run: there are high fixed costs associated with producing software. Yet extant software is so stupidly easy to copy that it's unthinkable that, thousands of years hence, things like WORD PROCESSORS will have a good reason for costing money. So how long will it take to get there?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-premium/
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft
Being able to screen share, conference call, regular calling/transferring/etc. in addition to secure IM and all that - it's really slick.
Full traceability too. Just look at your emails in Outlook, and tie 'em all together.
Meanwhile, all those people using the free version will be churning out lots of documents in Office file formats, adding to the value of having a copy of Office around. That in turn makes it more attractive to paying customers.
Otherwise I pay like $10 a month for the full office 365 suite, which is rather cheap.
The service/software may not be used for commercial,
non-profit, or revenue-generating activities.
For internal company presentations, perhaps it doesn't make sense to do fancy powerpoints. But if you can't make a presentation that looks credible, it betrays confidence in your ability to deliver on a product/service that is legitimate.
I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I can't figure out why most people would need Office today. Like I said I'm out of touch but...
If I write docs for publication it's HTML.
If I write for correspondence it's email
If I write for product design it's probably a wiki. Something the entire team can edit.
I am in no way suggesting that people don't have legit uses for Office or OpenOffice. I am saying that I have not had a legit use for Office in 6+ years.
Those few times I need to make a sign for party or a few page letter Google docs works fine. Even presentations I've done in Google docs just fine. Spreadsheets work fine as well. They can even be scripted if you want to do crazy stuff.
Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed?
Especially the Hacker News crowd. Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?
Much larger feature set.
Privacy.
Robustness and future-proofing.
Shall we go on?
Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?
Sure. I've never used word processors much for professional work, as I find different tools of one kind or another are usually a better choice for preparing any given documentation. But there is more to office suites than word processors. Spreadsheets, in particular, are still the most convenient tool for many administrative tasks.
The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one.
Just a thought.
As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad
Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping
the list goes on...
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets
I'm not suggesting you should give up Excel. Just pointing out the features you listed are available should you decide to take a look.
and it isn't so much about privacy for me though. I am not a journalist; I don't have sensitive information I need to hide from others.
I could use LibreOffice, as it supports Excel 2004 XML files, but Office is cheap enough and LibreOffice annoying enough that it's worth my time to just use the real thing rather than run the risk of a psychotic, gouge-my-eyes-out break from the still-horrible-in-2014 LibreOffice UX.
If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.
I can live without all of the rest. It's not only a great tool for my own use, but it's widespread enough to be a de facto standard.
My girlfriend has a WP8 phone and a Windows 8 laptop, and uses Live for all her PIM stuff -- but there isn't any way to get Live Calendar tasks/to-dos on her desktop. It works on her phone though, so go figure, and it also works in the web app.
This is what frustrates me with Microsoft. They have cool features and neat applications, and the new integration across devices is awesome... but they miss these little details, and that ruins the experience quite a bit :(
Anyhow, every time it happened, there was no apparent damage to the document. I think this stems from Microsoft having to be insanely aggressive in defending against their own bugs.
A big change from clunky Angularjs apps...
That was the interesting part of this submission! :-/
Perhaps changing it to "Microsoft Office Online free no longer hidden" would have been more appropriate.
Linking to just "Microsoft Office Online" gives no sense of the purpose of the post.
Not that it matters at this point. Just seems rather pedantic to change the title in such a way.
But where's my pivot table? j/k
Maybe you don't, but some people actually speak up for their rights.