Microsoft Changes Tack, Making Office Suite Free on Mobile | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Changes Tack, Making Office Suite Free on Mobile

nytimes.com

248 pointsshitehawk102 comments

One of the things that is missing from the comments here that say "Office Substitute X does 99% of what users need" is that in most companies, there is already a way of doing a task.

In many complex tasks, Excel is a front end to a complex business process. That business process is kicked off by some VBA code that talks to some COM object that talks to the back-end infrastructure. For example, in Finance, there are scenarios where that COM object kicks off a job on a Linux HPC cluster to compute, for example, the risk of a position that a trader is interested in. While "Office Substitute X" could potentially do the same thing, the trader has absolutely zero interest in using anything other than Excel, and he/she is the rainmaker.

So there is very little cannibalization of the existing desktop Office business for Enterprise customers. What this seems to be doing is taking people's familiarity with Office at work, and making it cheaper/easier for them to continue to experience Office in their personal lives.

I think you misunderstand the point of most of those comments. Numbers and Google Sheets for iPad have been available for months, so Microsoft's offering has to demonstrate value above and beyond those. Unfortunately, the 2014 offering doesn't really do that.

Having encountered an issue before (The workbook you are trying to open is an ISO Strict file), it's not clear if Microsoft actually leveraged the existing Office code in the mobile versions: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2960660

months? Don't you mean years? At least Numbers has been available since the very first iPad AFAIK - one of the things that Apple clearly did better with their iPad introduction compared to MS's Surface introduction with no touch optimized Office.

What would it take to see free Office for desktop without COM integration?

XCode simulator.

Office RT is included in Windows RT, which is now free.

VBA is joyless. I started my career as VBA dev. It was the shitiest job I've ever had and worst job I can imagine to do. Bloated unreliable with disgusting API (like try catching for contains method on collection).

worst job I can imagine to do

Come on.

ok - worst dev job. I still feel pain looking at ugly VB syntax

I had a job in university that involved picking up 20-foot-long sections of freshly sawn lumber (some of which weighed well over a hundred pounds) off of a moving set of chains and placing them in bins. That's it, for a 10 hour shift.

VBA sucks, but come on, there are worse jobs out there.

You probably got ripped, what did the VBA guy get?

Carpel tunnel, ocular cancer, and brain damage.

My first job (at 14) was a dishwasher. Not as bad as yours by the sound of it, but it was filthy and disgusting and I got paid $3.35 per hour.

Having that job put all my programming jobs in perspective. To preserve that I have a picture of a dude in a coal mine by my phone at work. Any time I'm asked to submit a pointless form, I think of that guy. I don't do this to shame myself but rather to put my work problems into perspective which helps me.

Yeah i worked in a perfume factory for a summer when I was 19. I often think back to that when I feel stressed at work.

I'd probably take the lumber job. Lots of time to think and built in exercise.

Expand your worldview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Jobs_in_History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Jobs

I have done VBA before. It is not the worst.

The worst was maintaining a Hotel front office guest system written in GW-Basic

Microsoft isn't concerned about losing the high end uses of Excel and Word, it's people not needing Word or Excel for documents or spreadsheets. They're already losing the very bottom end to Google Docs and other online tools, the question is whether they can hold the middle.

Office and Windows have a symbiotic relationship, and most of Microsoft's other products hang off of these two. Losing Office or Windows could prove disastrous for Microsoft.

I don't think MS Office* has ever really held the low end though, no? That was held by Works back in the day, or even WordPad. And if it was Word, then it was most likely on some educational discount or hardware bundle, meaning not much revenue in the first place for Microsoft.

Lately Google Docs and Pages have filled those spots, but I suspect this giveaway is just shoring up or buffering their stronghold in the workplace.

Strongly agreed on the symbiotic relationship. I actually bought a full version of Win7 and VMWare Fusion just to run the "real" Office apps on my Mac. (Tellingly, the actual Office Suite was only $10, through the Home Use Program)

* EDIT: Changed "I don't think Microsoft has ever..."

Microsoft never really held the low end, because that was instead held by Works, WordPad, or Word?

What?

Oops, edited.

On Windows they always held the low end with a free version of Office, which was a pirated copy. This is much harder on iOS, and I think with this move Microsoft acknowledges that they need to offer this version too.

The majority of the power of Office is only available on the desktop: COM, automation and integration.

This isn't a total give away, this is a loss leader which is just selling an editing front end for the files, not anything like the power of the full product.

However, I really think that Office on the desktop is a turd but it does make automation pretty easy but slightly awkward and painful. Perhaps this is bitterness from converting VSTO and Word interop to late binding all morning but I'm not a fan.

This is "meh" even to someone as embedded into the ecosystem like myself.

I believe most of Office's userbase doesn't use anything more complicated than excel's formulas and word's styles (perhaps some academyc writers use latex or fields)

In my sector (finance), literally everyone has some automation junk set up somewhere. They're usually written by one person and mailed around or stuck on fileservers somewhere or copied off a website somewhere badly.

It's surprisingly common. Even my wife who is a complete luddite has a couple of scripts for excel she copied off a web site to do a tax calculation.

I "love" when those things break and the original author left the company a decade ago... ugh.

...and then you get handed it to fix and find zero comments, undeclared variables (often single letters), and then 70 lines of "sheet scrolling" followed by the same loop 3 times in some internal function evidencing that half of it was done by macro record.

Not bitter at all. Nope.

That was my day today I.e. untangling one of those bags of shit that someone had tangled even more by converting it to a VSTO add in.

It's now a nice clean late-bound C# command line tool and powershell cmdlet.

The scripting in Google drive is pretty awesome. I saw some pretty impressive automation recently that a business analyst did where he'd grab spreadsheet attachments to emails in Gmail and analyze them in sheets.

Well it's awesome until you want to leave or want support or thought wave was good or one of your users violates their ToS and they take your entire account out before you are even notified or its down for a few hours when you're about to drop a big presentation to that client or you find out that local legislation changes make it illegal to export data out of the EU or you're somewhere with a basic GPRS connection or none whatsoever.

These are all real problems I've had to work around.

Understand your "meh" reaction, but I think this is an exciting announcement for people outside the ecosystem. Office has been unattainable for a huge set of PC users for a very long time... it was rare to find affordable PCs with Office pre-installed. Anyone remember Microsoft Works?

Now, it's post-PC. This is opening up Office to a whole new generation of users who have found their home in tablets.

The problem is that for the subset of features supported on mobile, other tools like Numbers are comparable and have been available for free for a long time. The features that make Excel and other office products shine, including automation and macros, are not supported.

While it is a solid move for Microsoft, that whole generation of new users wont see much of a difference between 2014 office for ipad and numbers.

LibreOffice has been available and does 99% of what 99% of users need.

You don't even need to go that far. Google Drive does 99% of what 99% of users need, and has second-to-none collaboration features to boot.

I bought my wife a Chromebook as a stopgap when her last Windows laptop died, and although she still has to use Windows for work, she now swears by Drive for working on shared documents.

I think Apple will not allow an embedded scripting language like VBA. On Android and Windows it should be possible.

Apple will allow as long as it doesn't involve JIT - i.e. awfully slow.

Interpreted languages are fast enough for what VBA has been traditionally used. You just need to steer away from the travesty of Atwood's Law.

It's a loss leader intended to retain users. Most of us have used Office regularly at some point, but many of us have drifted away as other non-Windows platforms became viable (Linux, OS X, iOS, Android) and adherence to the new ecosystem overcame adherence to the Office platform. We'd like to have Office available, if only for basic compatibility re: viewing & simple editing, but at $10/mo or $X00/flat we're satisfied with hacked-up translation to other ecosystem-standard suites (OpenOffice, Pages/Numbers/etc). Microsoft starts seeing the departure numbers growing rather high, and if they're smart (!) they will - and are - release[ing] something which persuades users to maintain a stake in the Office suite: free (albeit stunted) apps costing users nothing more than a shrug & download.

I'd rather give up on Office entirely, but its relative ubiquity plus free apps mean I'll let the camel stick its nose back under my tent.

I wouldn't exactly call Office a "loss leader" when it's MS's highest revenue division (circa 2012: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money-updated-20...).

The thread is about the _free_ MS Office apps being released today. I'm not paying for the $10/mo versions, but heck yeah I'll download the "loss leader" free versions, however crippled they may be.

These days, in many contexts, it's perfectly fine to ask someone to resend a file in a different format so it works with all devices. You can't always do that with business-related documents, but you're most likely using a laptop or desktop for that work anyway.

>third of Microsoft’s revenue during its last fiscal year — about $26 billion of $87 billion in total.

Wow, I know it was high, I never realized it was that high, I'm guessing that includes Exchange and administration app costs.

considering office is installed on something like 1 BILLION machines.. it's not that surprising. The software is rather expensive per machine.

Source: http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/ms_numbers.pdf

Google Docs have always been free, three weeks ago Apple's iWork suite went free, and now Office for mobile is free. Competition is a wonderful thing - hopefully it starts to bring down the price of Microsoft's cash cow, Office.

I'm just worried that we're going to start paying for those suites with our confidental document data instead of money... with no alternative choice.

That's how people pay for Google Docs and all of Google's products and they seem to be perfectly OK with it. As long as the perceived price is $0 they're happy and don't really care what the real price is for things. Ignorance truly is bliss.

I don't mind other people using that, but I'd rather have at least a single mobile/desktop office suite available that does not send everything to US -_-

LibreOffice comes in mind for that one.

But not everyone uses Google Docs, and not every user trusts it with important or confidential data.

A lot of people/companies/governments are not okay with it, and do not use it.

LibreOffice is at least a serviceable alternative.

It can't overcome the "I need MS Office" problem, and it might not be feature equivalent for layout, but for 90% of stuff that is just some text, it should be fine.

If you're worried don't use the software.

From what I can tell, iWork isn't free unless you buy new hardware, and that deal has been around for a year now.

They changed it with the release of Yosemite. It's now free for anyone with iOS8 or OSX 10.10

I don't think so. I have an older MacBook Pro, and I'm running the latest OS X (and iOS). Comes up as 20$ each for Keynote / Numbers / Pages on OS X, 10$ each on iOS.

Nope. You need to purchase new (late 2013 or newer) hardware to get it.

iWork only runs on Apple's hw, but I didn't think you needed to buy _new_ hw. I believe you only need to update to Mavericks (or Yosemite).

A wonderful thing for end users. A shitty thing for people who actually believe they can have a career building software that sells.

Huh, interesting. What I like most about this is that Microsoft has been putting out a major piece of news (Microsoft Band, Independence Day, now this, etc.) every few days. I feel as if we're now beginning to really see product-level changes as a consequence of Satya being CEO. I'm very excited by these developments.

Product cycles are much much longer. So, no.

Ex MSFT employee here. Product cycles may or may not be longer, but red tape was the biggest issue when Ballmer was running the ship. There have always been many awesome teams working on cool stuff at MSFT, they were just never allowed to launch anything.

“We’d like to dramatically increase the number of people trying Office,”

Smart, considering its the better product and you still have the option to download an actual program.

With such low market share, they had to do something. Giving it away is not the answer. They're thinking that a loss leader will increase sales on their regular Office licenses, but that remains to be seen. All I see is further validation to the market that mobile apps should be free.

This is bad news for independent developers and established software houses alike.

I still prefer LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice runs on mobile devices?

There is an Android port. It is... Interesting. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenof...

Well, it's ugly, but I don't doubt it's useful if you're on a tablet.

...wow. Looks like they just tried to copy the UI from desktop _exactly_. I guess it's pretty hard to get the manpower to develop mobile apps as well as the desktop version of such a large OS project.

Good lord that looks rubbish, but also quite charming. I can't help but look at it and smile.

As far as I recall, that's the same Chrome does on Windows 8 with the Metro mode. It looks identical to the desktop version, down to tiny toolbar buttons you can't reliably hit with a finger, etc.

AndrOpenOffice is a port of of Apache OpenOffice, not LibreOffice. It's ... a bit of a dancing bear.

* An Android interface is in development. * CloudOn has just done a proprietary version for iOS (including a lot of contribution to the core code).

What do you prefer about it? I use it, but it seems to have semi-broken aspects (I'm thinking of how frames work -- I use them a lot and have had a lot of trouble with them in Libre Office).

Great, I'll be busy prepping an Android VM appliance for this that I can install on every machine I touch. Probably a good idea to isolate Office code from the real OS anyway. Hope I can get printing to work.

Given there is Android for x86 (atom), it should not be that hard indeed.

I wonder why you're being downvoted for a hackish idea on a site called 'Hacker News' eyes rolling. I think the idea is interesting - not sure how to make file sharing work though, can you mount SSH drives from the local network on Android? Or do you want to just use Dropbox for that?

Before Microsoft used to be this tightly integrated system. You had Office only on Windows, all mobile apps come on Windows Phone first. Satya has changed the company quite a lot . Each division works as an independent unit, they compete. Another example of this was the dropbox integration into office. Clearly one of the reasons to use Skydrive was the easy integration into Office. With the new integration, Skydrive will have to compete on features instead of getting fed because of its integration with office. Waiting for the day when IE becomes cross-platform.

> You had Office only on Windows

Mac versions of Office have been available for decades. In fact, the first version of Office was actually released for the Macintosh and not for Windows

I can't find it in the app store. Is it not actually out yet?

It's on the Play Store at least.

Not released for tablets on Play Store. Only smartphones...

You can sign up (nominate yourself?) for the Office for Android Tablet Preview here: http://www.instant.ly/s/w7taW/nav

(Found by clicking through several links of the article and removing the SessionID in their link.)

A lot of big announcements at once from MS. Free Office, new Band, and did you see they're opening the Azure ML for free testing?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2014/...

It's funny that Microsoft is advertising the Surface as a sort of iPad++, while at the same time making full Office free for the iPad, but not for the Surface. (I know, Surface Pro is a full Windows PC and the iPad isn't, and Windows Office has more features than iPad Office... Just saying the marketing is kinda inconsistent with the sales approach.)

Pretty much every ad aired this year for the Surface Pro 3 compares it directly to a MacBook Air, not to an iPad. (Literally--the MacBook is on camera alongside the Surface Pro in many of these ads.)

To the extent that you perceive the Surface advertised as iPad++, you're probably thinking more of the original Surface ads one to two years ago (which focused on the regular Surface, which did in fact ship with a free copy of Office).

This will have different impact in different economies of the world. And eventually the bigger demographies will give MS a chance to make some space.

Let us see what sticky features MS brings. So that in the longer run a user gets caught in smooth integration of Mobile and Notebook version of Office.

But there are fewer hopes now. Too late.

I think this is a huge and fundamental change for Microsoft...

Satya Nadella (Microsoft's CEO) understands that you don't choose your endusers platform. If you don't go with them, you'll loose them on the long run.

at first I thought, cool, but then realized that I'd miss google docs too much if I went back to Office. Aside from Excel which I don't use (prefer Pandas), I'd miss the collaborative document sharing and interoperability between laptop (Mac) and desktop (Linux.) Maybe Office does the document sharing/collaborative editing thing now. It's been a long time since I've used a MSFT product. although I will buy the Band, that looks awesome and the price point makes it irresistible to early adopters.

Office and Office.com / OneDrive have had collaborative document editing for a while. Not sure about the mobile apps.

Does anyone know if how good is the integration with the underlying OS?

MS Office on desktop won't work on mobile devices without re-thinking the interface and UX.

Office for iPad is very well designed, now they need to upgrade it on Windows Phone

Smart move by Nadella and Co. I'm a sure they will see an increase in office 365 subscriptions in the near future to make up the ROI.

Does this have any implications for the forthcoming update to Office for Mac?

Is this a sign of what happens when a cloud guy becomes CEO?

Current generation of kids are using Google Docs in school right now. Can Office survive another generation?

if MS charge a high price, biggest winner is apple.

"Come in to my parlour" said the spider[1] to the fly[2].

[1] NSA partner

[2] You

If you think your data is safe on either device, with or without Office, then you are deluded.

Oh I think it's pretty safe on a non-wired/wireless enabled computer in a room with thick concrete walls filled with lead.

;)

Alright then. Lets give up. Lets offer up our private lives to the prying eyes and ears of the NSA.

If you own a cell phone, you already have.

You shouldn't parade your ignorance.

It's clearly being upstaged by yours.

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