Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad? | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad?

theguardian.com

I imagine the strategy is that if you want Office on a tablet, you need to buy a Surface. Apparently it's not reason enough.

People don't buy whole devices for an app. Or at least not most people.

> People don't buy whole devices for an app.

For the record, I've heard variants of the exact opposite argument for why "people will never switch from iOS to Android", or "I could never give up $APP on my iPhone".

If Office really is that important to you, then yes, you might actually consider getting a Surface (tablet/laptop combo) instead of a Macbook and an iPad separately.

I'm pretty sure that's not true, and many people do very much buy a device for one killer app. Look at games consoles, if the tablet market alone isn't convincing.

However, I very much doubt anyone is going to buy a tablet-style device (of any brand) for this kind of application, because it's a silly kind of application to run on a tablet-style device.

What reasons do you believe people are buying devices for it not the applications on them?

If you are putting the emphasis on app then I would point out that Office is used by almost as many people as Facebook, so an app is a bit of an over simplification.

You get the full Office 2013 suite with most x86 tablets nowadays (which you won't when you buy a Surface oddly enough). For me that definitely played a part in my decision to get an Asus T100.

I stopped installing office on my PCs about 10 years ago, for the first few years replaced with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and more recently things like wikis and confluence and google docs. Its amazing how little it really matters. Most of the stuff I get sent by MS Office users I can interop with. But every parent in the country still thinks their kids need Office installed to do their homework.

Occasionally you get people who have gone really over the top on the Word or Powerpoint template so that the thing is totally unreadable on any non-MS platform. I was thinking we need a campaign really - "Keep your document formatting simple" -- no one is impressed with logos in footers or really complicated tables within word or clever animations on powerpoint anymore ... if everyone stuck to the 80% of features that interop well we'd be much better off.

"logos in footers" is now an advanced, "over-the-top" piece of formatting?

Yes.

Yes. Twenty years ago when adding logos to a page layout was a minor technical challenge, you could show some professionalism by sticking your logo everywhere. It made it look expensive. These days it just makes it look like you're a Word Noob.

Because it's an awful productivity device?

It has no usable filesystem, poor integration between applications, awful input device support, a tiny screen and is impractical for office work.

Yes I do own one for reference.

>impractical for office work

yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad. If you are mostly an email person, being able to open these attachments is useful.

everytime i see people with ipads in meetings (same applies for android tablets) they usually use them as document viewers. why do you need a full office suite to do that?

...use them as document viewers. why do you need a full office suite to do that?

You don't, but unless the only people you work with are the kind who like to look at things and talk lots but never actually produce anything of value, there are other considerations.

I think these points are specifically addressing bringing an ipad to meetings where you're less likely to be producing so much as consuming or discussing (most of the time).

Right, but that suggests there are also desktop/laptop machines running "real Office" that the same people use for creating new material. Microsoft still make an awful lot of money serving that market.

Meanwhile, the norms for selling tablet software are very different to traditional business software. ("What, you want me to pay TEN WHOLE DOLLARS for an app that's going to save me at least an hour every day? Are you crazy?!")

Releasing a full office suite onto tablets is not a no-brainer decision in that context, and I'm not surprised the new CEO hasn't pushed the button yet.

It seems unlikely that a tablet version would make anything like the revenues per user the traditional desktop version did. Perhaps MS can establish some sort of subscription SaaS model here, but I'm extremely sceptical about the long-time viability of that model as a replacement for traditional COTS software products.

On the other hand, if a tablet version provided a decent viewing platform for people who do do more reading than writing, it could potentially damage desktop sales if those people would otherwise have been added into the site licence or similar for the full desktop suite but no longer feel they need to be because they can just use the tablet at their desks as well.

Well the meetings I've been in, I'm constantly waiting for those people with quotes like:

"oh it's not rendering properly - I can't see the project plan"

"it's on page 450... the app closed on page 300"

"It's attached to the document - all I can see is an X"

etc etc...

I'll be damned if I couldn't be doing something more productive then...

So are these actual quotes from people you've interacted with? Otherwise, your comment is a strawman.

I've been in meetings with people who have iPads, most with keyboard cases. In one such case, this woman (a PM for our project) asked meaningful questions, took notes, then sent out the minutes and action items as soon as the meeting closed. I was sitting next to her the entire time, so I saw what she used: Mail.app, Safari for various internal and cloud-based web-apps, Skype, and Fantastical for giving herself some tasks/reminders and setting up a followup meeting.

She made big use of the multitouch gesture for iPad app-switch in a very elegant and no-fuss kind of way. The copy/paste seemed a bit time consuming, but clearly she was used to it and didn't make a fuss about it.

While in some organizations you may need a full-on laptop, that use-case is being chipped away every year.

btw, that example about project plan is really Microsoft's fault - Microsoft really needs to provide a non-Windows (preferably web-compatible) .mpp viewer, yes, I have MOOS, but it's pretty sad that the PM has to export the Gannt chart or hope the team has the right viewer.

Yes they are. I spend a lot of time in meetings with these people. Definitely not a straw man.

The project plan was an embedded WMF so its not about Microsoft project.

>yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad

Do you mean a lot of people bring iPads to meetings as an alternative to devices practical for office work? Or am I missing something?

Have you tried one with a good bluetooth keyboard/enclosure?

I was surprised with how much of a difference it makes. I got an iPad3 at launch, and never bothered with a keyboard cover. It was, like you said, an awful productivity device. I got a keyboard cover with my iPad Air, and it made a night & day difference in terms of productivity.

How does that help remedy the other four problems he mentioned, especially the ones totally independent of input devices, though?

It doesn't, and you know that.

I tried using iPads with keyboard covers. Having to constantly switch between tapping the screen and typing was a dealbreaker for me. There's zero integration for keyboards beyond the ability to type in textboxes and a few system shortcuts. You can't even select apps with the arrow keys on the homescreen!

Well, if your expectation is to just turn the iPad into a laptop, it's not going to work out. If you want to turn it into an iPad you can type faster on, it will be much better.

Funny, Microsoft seems to have figured out how to strike a middle ground.

I was just thinking about this as I woke up. Somewhere in my HN comment history, I took a contrarian (and supporting) position about the pre-iPad Microsoft tablet vaporware commercial: basically that if they did do something like this, with an accurate stylus and split-pages multitasking, it would be a winner.

That's not the middle ground iPad is aiming for, though. It's a spectrum, and it sounds like you'd rather have a Surface. Sometimes I think I'd like one to doodle with, too. I've seen people be productive with iPads as well, but you have to use them differently.

What if someone released a "limited virtual machine" that included WINE running inside an emulator but only allowed you to install Office on it? Emulation performance concerns aside, it's actually possible to capture all the keystrokes coming from a bluetooth keyboard on iOS. (And get it in the store if you're sneaky enough.) It should be possible to do this. (I also have a scheme for dealing with the mouse UI.)

I'm not sure an iPad would have enough computing power to run VM + QEMU + Wine + Office.

You can leave off the VM, as it's redundant to QEMU. Also, there are emulation strategies that rewrite the machine language to the native ISA instead of interpreting. One of those that cached the translated code would be more appropriate than QEMU emulation. WINE Is Not an Emulator, it's more of a library.

It would be hard, but it would be doable.

EDIT: New iPads are supposed to be equivalent to a low end dual core laptop from a few years ago.

office for ipad will cannibalize windows sales. unless the question is if microsoft is willing to sacrifice revenue from windows to earn more from office.

and if they release office for ipad how long after will they release it for android ?

Even if they were successful, it's unlikely that they'd earn more from Office by being on the iPad. It's not going to sustain the prices that Microsoft is used to. This is their dilemma, they simply can't win no matter which way they go.

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