Microsoft launches Office for iPad
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Good to see that, competition is always good for the users, and Apple, Google and MS all seem to be quite strong on their fields (although Google is the most fashionable nowadays).
Once you have a bunch of important documents locked up in Office file formats -- which Office is the only app guaranteed to be able to read reliably -- you have a great incentive down the road to start sending money to Microsoft so you can continue to access them.
Subscriptions bleed money from users continually, regardless of how often they use something. Paying for major upgrades only allows the user to upgrade based on whether they need certain features and potentially skip every other update or so if they use the software only lightly.
For example, my personal at-home copy of MS Office is the 2003 version. I use it so rarely that this does not matter, especially with other options available that can view and edit MS Office documents.
I stopped using VMWare Fusion, for example, because they got into the habit of releasing paid upgrade versions that were required in order to run on Apple's new OS X version. Perhaps it's not their fault that Apple's OS updates broke VMWare's virutalization, but I don't use this often enough at home to want to pay for an upgrade every year. Before I would pay for an upgrade every 2 or 3 years. Now I've switched to VirtualBox at home.
For business use, software is used much more often and it matters a lot more to have it up-to-date. So in that case a yearly subscription might make sense.
Maybe a few years ago. I'm not sure how many CIOs are still drinking that Kool-Aid today, though.
If you really use Office every day during the workday, it's worth the money. The $15/m that my company pays per user for our 365 account is well worth the money.
I don't understand why that was downvoted. Office 365 is expensive...compared to a one-time purchase you own forever. I don't understand why users aren't showing more resistance to subscription-based software (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.)...it's as if people enjoy getting screwed over.
The most exciting thing would be Mono becoming a first-class citizen for .NET.
I think this is likely for two reasons:
1) They may well acquire Xamarin, which would result in them 'owning' Mono.
2) The new CEO has been extremely forward thinking vs the rest of Microsoft on supporting open source software on Azure.
3) Increasing amounts of ASP.NET and other .NET technologies are open source now
I would love for them to do this. I think they'd also do very well out of it, as Azure is great platform.
Imho, their strategy for asp.net can be easily what you described here.
That sounds to me like a reference to some boxed product running ASP.NET. Possibly aspDotNetStorefront? If so, that competes with PHP platforms for being a mess of code and non-sense design decisions.
I can hear people talking about Scala, Ruby, Node and saying better performance + dev experience (whether I agree or not) -- but Java? Not flaming here, that just doesn't sound like a well informed statement.
I mean, it doesn't really even make sense to have a closed-source application programming language in this day and age, where the community building and maintaining it is entirely employed by a single company. It just isn't efficient enough, the maintenance is intractable, and you end up with false starts because the whole thing is subject to the whims and shifting priorities of management.
Besides, Sun open-sourced Java back in 2006, already...
Why do you think that would be the case?
When I think "open-source" I think "fragmented, lots of utterly terrible things, lots of half-finished false-starts".
Since the late 1990s, South Korea has had a law that any website transmitting any sort of banking/financial data was required to use a specific ActiveX plugin for encryption. This law was in place for years after ActiveX was officially deprecated, and I believe that it has only just recently been amended to allow other crypto implementations.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Microsoft+Co...
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/12/5404098/microsoft-consider...
But what's shocking is that the first tablet-optimized version of Office is arriving not on Windows RT, but on iOS. That speaks volumes about the state of Windows today – and about how Nadella is under no illusions.
Office for iPad may have started under Ballmer, but it's hard to imagine it getting this high a priority without his successor making what I'm sure was a tough call.
https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-2...
The office on my surface is just the desktop one without any optimization for touch screens. Edit: and yes, I do not think that the "touch optimized features" they are describing on that site is enough for a real rt app.
I'm guessing the usability differences are night and day between the two devices.
Since the introduction of the Metro ('modern') UI, Microsoft has not been able to really show the power and possibilities of it. Office for Metro should fix this, and show people how Metro is superior to the iOS and Android UI. Supposedly Office Metro has been in development for years (project Gemini), but as it turns out: it's not ready. And Office for iPad is.
I hope we'll hear more about office for Metro soon, maybe next week at Build?
They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.
It's kind of funny, though. Jobs was pragmatic enough to realize that it was better to get Microsoft to "open up" than to win the lawsuit. It's hard to say, but I definitely think it paid off.
I'm sick of Outlook on OSX (it's the only Office app I use), I can add rules, but I can't add notifications so I miss all of my emails. Now I've turned it off I have to manually order things.
On top of that I'm stuck with Calibri as the default font. The default can't be changed.
The very fact that it's different makes it worse for me. I can use Excel 2010 for Windows without thinking about the tool. Small differences like startup behaviour, position of things on the ribbon, and keyboard shortcut force me to think about how to use Excel for Mac, rather than focusing on the task at hand.
Some, but not all, of this is down to differences in the platform and platform-specific design conventions.
Excel had a pretty nasty regression on the Macintosh in Office 2004/2008 (to the point at which I no longer used it on the Mac in 2008, it was pretty horrid) - but they returned it to (mostly) feature parity as of Office 2011.
Sharepoint, on the other hand, is complete crap on a Macintosh. It's almost like it's been designed to be bad.
I've been using it in enterprise for years and never found a missing feature.
Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.
I googled this:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...
- Then Steve Jobs himself. I think these specifics support my initial comment.
"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again."
Again, this is an old subject. Google "video for windows" "source code" apple quicktime
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows#Overview
"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."
But ok, I can comment:
As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.
Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.
An anecdote:
One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)
But you almost certainly knew this.
Adobe sells to an industry niche of creative professionals. That's a substantially different situation. A lot more computers have Word installed than Photoshop.
Apple made their money selling proprietary hardware, first computers, then mobile devices.
Microsoft made their money selling proprietary operating systems while commoditizing hardware (PCs).
Google made their money selling proprietary advertising on commodity software on commodity devices. Browsers were already a commodity, they're commoditizing operating systems by doing everything through the web browser, and they're commoditizing mobile devices with Android.
Now Microsoft is trying to get into the mobile device market, after Google already commoditized it, a strategy that's doomed to failure.
They're also trying to get into the data center and IaaS/PaaS market, but that's already been somewhat commoditized by Amazon, Google, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc.
The companies that are still making money off a proprietary platform, are doing it because they haven't allowed it to be commoditized yet. MS still makes most of their money from platform lock-in in the corporate market, but as soon as that product gets commoditized, their goose is cooked.
So sure, Microsoft doesn't want to become just a software shop like Adobe, but then, it doesn't look like they really have much of a choice in the matter.
It's always easy to see who's in the bubble.
Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.
Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)
So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.
When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.
http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...
market -> all the people
encompasses your share
share -> using your stuff
Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-number...
but your statement about usage is wrong see the following article on app use:
http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-...
If more people are buying product A, but product B has a longer useful life, then it conceivable for product B to have a higher usage share.
The problem is that usage share is a lot harder to measure than market share. But ultimately it's the more important number when it comes to things like network effect and developer and consumer mindshare.
80 million OSX (any version) users world wide in 2012 http://www.cultofmac.com/172693/mac-os-x-by-the-numbers-60-m...
110 million windows 8(just windows 8 not windows in general) users in 2013 http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/there-are-now-over-110-mil...
believe it or not their are 500 million windows xp users still http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-to-cut-windows-xp-2...
Market share actually does in some respect account for a sum of existing products in use, how that is calculated will depend on the reporting entity.
Usage share turns out to be super easy to capture these days, we do it by looking at the browser string of a request to a web server. Most big sites are putting out this type of data so a relatively clear picture emerges.
For a company like microsoft or apple market share is a more useful measure because it helps them plan/predict their supply chain so that they have the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time.
But from a developer perspective usage share is more interesting for obvious reasons.
In this case the numbers are still basically the same.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute...
Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple.
Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing
And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.
PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)
since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware
edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.
* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)
* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows
* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM
* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows
* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes
* printed from DOSBox and got [2]
1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)
2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...
Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.
PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.
You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).
Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)
My mum hasn't touched her PC in several months.
Most people have a computer in their home. If they graduated to mobile devices, they didn't just chuck the thing in the trash, they kept it around. They still probably get photos off their camera or print coupons on it, because AirPrint and whatever Androids 4.4 printing thing is are barely known about, crummy, and only supported on a fraction of devices
Windows is not the dominant computing platform, because PCs are not the dominant computing platform. Smartphones have been outselling PCs since 2011 – not even considering tablets. Windows is obviously still the dominant PC OS, but unlike the 1990's, that doesn't make it the dominant platform.
This is an article about Microsoft releasing Office for smartphone and tablet OSes. To ignore them from your evaluation of the "dominant platform" seems foolish.
And office is becoming worse, merging is awful, online editing is completely broken (saving.... saving.... saving....)
If anyone at Microsoft is reading this thread, please for the love of god spend some time on vagrant-windows, the WinRM gem and making it easy for us to make open-source projects available on windows. It's a nice gesture to make InternetExplorer VMs available for website testing, but if you can't easily automate the testing via tools like vagrant it's really only half a solution.
PS that link isn't loading for me.
PSS if you are an MS engineer working on this stuff, can you please contact me via the email in my profile. I didn't see an email in yours.
VirtualBox can be godawful at times. What's not working for you?
Near as I can tell the issue has to do with the WinRM gem, which I'd debug myself, but looking at the source and what it does, I am woefully unequipped to debug that issue without spending a lot of time that I should be spending on other work. I'm simply too far removed from the Windows world to even know where to begin.
I needed help from some of them to transfer management (have my own domain name now). He called me within 2 hours, the same evening he watched my screen and we followed the additional required steps (wouldn't have found those steps solo i'm affraid).
Great and fast support, i guess that's why Microsoft is "enterprise".
(ps. Subscription wasn't hard, you have to explain your idea and what you're trying to build. Then you get access to Media Services, Virtual Machines, ...)
That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices anyway, despite their lack of Office. Then folks find out that they can do what they want to do despite that lack of Office. Maybe they've been using it by default, not because they really need it. Then Microsoft comes out with Office for iOS and there's a collective shrug and a "meh".
I've seen much more openness to other document formats across industries. It's a bit like BYOD in enterprise, but at the document level. For example, it's been 5 years since I've been at a conference that requires slides to be PPT.
They will probably always own the high end: advanced documents for the 20% of knowledge workers that need those features; custom Enterprise workflows, etc. But fewer and fewer people will ever require access to the Office Suite in any form.
A long time ago I thought that LibreOffice or Pages were close enough, good enough to not need Office, but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place. It might be 98% OK, but you can't always afford to give up on the 2% of information your are missing.
Forcing Office users to give a sensible version of the files when sharing is the best solution, but having a native iOS version of Office for when that's not an option is invaluable.
We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.
What I'd really want in the first place is people to care if what they are sharing is in the right format.
When a non technical clients asks a designer to see some early drafts of a site's UI, they will usually receive rendered jpg or png files, not Photoshop or Illustrator files. Most school teachers would be pissed of if students were to turn in home assignments in tex. I find it inconsiderate to send me docx files for documents that are read only on my side, just send me the PDF instead.
This is a good move, and Microsoft has always been better as the underdog, they've just been away from that role for a long time.
Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.
If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w/r/t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.
Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it's vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.
Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition.
Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.
Considering no 'upfront' cost that isn't really too bad for me, and I have no problems paying for tools I actually use to get work done.
If people want to edit Office documents using non-Office software there are plenty of free alternatives.
The fact that Microsoft is the only company able to do this without formatting errors is value that I think is worth the fee.
Sure sounds expensive to me. I'll stick to the Apple office suite for now.
Subscription just bundles everything together.
That said, $100/yr is extremely expensive in most countries in the world.
Because Google Docs continues to suck?
The simplicity of the sharing the subscriptions made me a believer.
There will always be people who will complain about the cost of subscription for both XBL and Office 365, but I think it is reasonably priced at least in the US.
Granted, that gives you access to a huge suite of applications. But if you only need, say, three of them, you can subscribe individually, which at $20/app/month, would cost you a mere $720/year!
And unlike Office, which is still available as a desktop app without a subscription, Adobe has discontinued its entire non-subscription-based suite.
1. How many documents do you never share with anybody else?
2. The same model seems to work fine for Adobe Acrobat.
Especially w.r.t #2: if they get the editor on many, and the viewer on a large fraction of devices, this might hurt PDF a bit.
Would I start to think this way about Word docs? Is that good for MS?
Microsoft has tried to displace PDF before (with XPS), so I'm sure they will be happy if they could take something away from Adobe. One thing I'm willing to take a stab at: it won't happen overnight or even in a year.
If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.
I can't help but wonder, however, how would you expect Office Online to compare to Google Docs in terms of privacy (including in the long run)?
2 parents + 3 kids? Not bad. Not sure what the stance is on doing some "framily" thing where you share it with friends.
And even the 60 Skype minutes has come in handy when I've needed to make international calls.
I'm still not a huge fan of applications I'm used to buying once every few years moving to the subscription model, but admittedly there are some positives with what MS has done here.
[1] http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/13/announcing-office-365-per...
PowerPoint: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipa...
"I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success." -- Steve Jobs.
Reading between the lines, a less polite version is that Jobs went to Bill Gates and said, "I need a lifeline. Apple is circling the drain. You are going to throw me that lifeline. We are going to do a deal whereby I drop our patent suits against you, and in return you invest in Apple and support us with Office, and say we're best buddies in public. Or else I wind up Apple as a computer company and spend the remaining billion dollars in our accounts on turning Apple into the biggest, baddest patent troll ever. And I will go kamikaze on your ass, and there will be blood and screaming and absolutely no mercy, because I offered you this deal and you turned it down and I remember my enemies forever. Oh and by the way, the DOJ anti-trust folks will be watching. Deal or no deal?"
(This is quite distinct from the 1983/84 Jobs/Gates deal whereby Steve gave Bill an exclusive to be the first office app vendor on the Mac -- as described in "Fire in the Valley" and elsewhere -- which is how Word for Mac got started.)
Playing up the ribbon in the presentation? Curious as ribbon really has triggered a love it or hate it reaction.
What do you hate about it? I find it to be just a bigger toolbar.
The thing I care about the most is UI responsiveness, so Apple's iOS (upto 6, hate 7) UI has always impressed me with its fluidity. Google is web based which I hate the most. I cant understand how any sane person could use a shitty bloated web app over a high performance native application.
Our company moved entirely to Google Docs about 5 years ago. Being sent a Word file is like being handed a CD ROM - a brief moment for a 'Oh, one of those' mental gear change and a few minutes rummaging in the dead tech box for an external drive. Or in Office's case something that can reliably parse the file
We are witnessing a new Microsoft that began when new CEO Satya Nadella took the helm. This is his first of many acts to turn the company around, instead of the previous closed door approach Balmer preferred.
It's good to see Satya doesn't appear to be full brainwashed by the Microsoft cool-aid. This isn't 1998, Windows is no longer the dominant platform and it makes sense to open up your products to other platforms, especially given Microsoft's failure to break ground in the mobile market.
Now all Satya needs to do is bring back the start menu in Windows 9, get rid of that horrid Metro tile interface for non touch devices (or at the very least give users the option of the new Metro interface or classic desktop) and I'll be ecstatic.
The decision to release it is Nadella's.
I have. It's just a viewer for office formats.
If that subscription model takes be ready for Windows 9 to come as an Ad Supported Free Version and a paid version that costs 100 bucks a year cause you were so onboard with continuously paying for office for years on end.
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2009/09/ba...
A qualifying Office 365 subscription is required to edit and create documents.
Qualifying plans include:
Office 365 Home
$99.99 PER YEAR
Office 365 Small Business Premium
$150.00 per user per year
Office 365 Midsize Business
$180.00 per user per year
Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government)
$264.00 per user per year
Office 365 Education A3 and A4
Students: $36.00 per user per year
Teachers: $72.00 per user per year
Office 365 Pro Plus
$?????
Office 365 University
Same as educational license?
That said, monthly subscriptions I avoid like the plague. Why? All is fine while business is good. When things aren't great subscriptions bleed much-needed capital. If cancelling your subscriptions means taking away such things as Office and email you are screwed and have to take money from some other part of the business to keep them going.
That's why I've always run our own email servers and always purchased licenses of software like Office Pro. We don't have to update the software every year. When things are good --and if it makes sense-- you upgrade. During lean times you have the option to not spend any money on upgrades and still have full usage of your software. Having experienced this a couple of times over the years I don't like the idea of any mission critical service being tied to a monthly per-user licence, it's a bad idea.
Beyond that, I wish MS would stop this nonsense of having so many layers to their products. One Windows and one Office, none of this "Home", "Home Premium", "Pro", "Pro Plus", "Really Really Pro Premium Plus", etc.
I do a lot of writing (I am pretty much addicted to writing books). I use my iPad for lots of casual writing using a good text editor and markdown files in Dropbox (target is leanpub.com). For some writing I like having Pages on both iOS and OS X with iCloud storage.
If Office 360 ends up being a compelling product for iPad and my MacBook Air, then the $99/year is a no-brainer decision.
http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/27/announcing-the-office-you...
In other words : Is there an "Open with Word Online" button for non office 365 subscribers?
I do not believe that feature is in Office for iPad and you should be able to point your browser to OneDrive.com/office.com to get to your documents using Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote Online in the meantime.
This is a really interesting idea though so I'll bring it up with the team, thanks!
I also bet any other company would not get away with a model like that. Apple requires that you make payments through their AppStore or in-app Payment systems so it can collect its cut. Good luck trying to publishing something with the same model on the App Store.
Naturally if you buy a subscription from outside the app, Apple don't get a cut - that's how everything works and as long as you don't give the user a way to get to the non-Apple subscription payment system from inside the app, Apple is fine with that.
I for one am deeply disappointed with the direction Apple has taken with iWork.
Not least of which is the (a) removal of features and (b) incompatibility with recent versions of their own software [this has rendered large portions of my documents unreadable]
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/there-are-now-over-110-mil...
http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...
Just because a PC is sold with Win8 (because prior versions aren't available) doesn't mean people are using it as such. They had to bring back "boot to desktop" as a configuration option, and 60% of win8 machines launch metro less than once a day (https://www.soluto.com/reports).
However, most OS features do not trigger a new hosting process. For example, connecting to a Wi-Fi network, or opening the charms. (Control Panel would get detected as a Metro app, but how many people open Control Panel every day?)
So while it's not perfect, it is possible to make a first stab at measurement.
For example, GMail app is way slower and irresponsive in the iPad than accessing directly from gmail.com in Safari.
As a side note, App Store search is still lacking: Looking for 'microsoft office' did not result in a single hit related to actual apps from Microsoft. Googling for App Store links to the four new apps was easier in the end …
Microsoft is finally adopting open source with open arms.
So, are they going to discard Windows (|phone|tablet|...) platform and become a pure third-party? It reminds me of Sega.
Microsoft has for whatever reason never hit the target with mobile platforms. I guess the Windows Phone is decent enough by some accounts but was just way too late to the party.
So they can try to make money selling mobile software for a mobile platform that nobody uses, or they can just accept reality and sell the software on all platforms.
In my opnion, Office is the ace software of Microsoft. It is even the de-facto standard. Therefore Microsoft should keep them exclusive on their platform.
If their mobile software succeeds and becomes as near-essential as Office once was, that could well create a halo effect for their mobile platforms. After all if you use MS software every day on your phone or tablet, why not buy an MS phone or tablet next time you're in the market for one?
Their first order of business in mobile is to become relevant again. Today took their best shot at that in a very long time.
You have no idea how much i want this to happen...
REALLY HD SUPER MARIO!
Siri integration, obviously. We've come full-circle.
So yeah, iPad.
This is lame, IMO, and so typical for MS.
There's a huge universe of companies more than willing to pay for these, and it's about time that MS take advantage of re-establishing Office as a cross-device dominant platform for the everyday office worker, rather than losing its edge as an office platform because of silly hardware / software politics internal to their own organization.
No, they're in denial about the fact that they pay for their software, with their privacy, every minute they're on "free" services.
Close. We aren't used to keep paying for software with no end in sight. Don't know about you but I subscribe to things I know I will be using regularly. Like daily. Guess were office software falls? Not under the daily usage at home.
Am I supposed to start writing word docs each week and mail them to my family just so I don't feel ripped of cause I am continuously paying for office?
Just wait until the next Windows costs 100 bucks a year. Cause that is where this is headed and apparently people don't seem to have any problem overpaying Microsoft for software.
So don't buy it. I don't own Photoshop, but I don't go to Adobe threads and decry that they charge money for their products.
1. They allow easy access to upgrades, and make it far easier to make sure everyone is on the latest and greatest (you aren't paying for every upgrade, so there is little incentive to hold out.)
2. The consumer pays far less up front -- for example, Adobe Creative Suite costs $600+ and that is money you have to pay upfront. Or I can pay $30 a month to use all of the software in that suite. In my example, I would never buy Photoshop as I can't justify $600+ in price for my uses. $30 a month I can justify. Basically, as a consumer I get access to software/functionality that I never would have had access to before.
3. I only pay for as long as I need it. If after a 6 monhts, I no longer have a need for the software, I cancel my subscription. As simple as that. I have not wasted a lot of money.
4. Which leads to making the software publishers work harder to put in features that help a larger base of users, not just corporate users. And to provide theses features on a more regular basis to keep me paying the monthly fee.
Sure, you can look at it the way you are suggesting but overall I think it is a win/win scenario.
It's a lot better with things like Office, where other programs have been able to extract the data, but it still seems too much like extortion for my liking.
Edit: Fixed possible factual error.
I think that's a little unfair. The technology just wasn't ready yet. The one place they got it really wrong was with the OS but we didn't have WiFi yet (well most people didn't), we didn't have the kind of touch displays we have now, flash storage wasn't cost effective so they probably used HDD's. They had the general idea right but were too early. Unfortunately when the tech was ready MS was too slow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing
(Watch some of the youtube demos, really cool)
Gates has attacked the iPad on every interview claiming that it's useless.