
Amazon Planning a Microsoft Office Killer - jswny
http://news.softpedia.com/news/amazon-planning-a-microsoft-office-killer-513306.shtml
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jknoepfler
Having worked in aws for two years, I have zero faith in Amazon's ability to
deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual.

Also, I'm sorry, amazon has absolutely no strength in enterprise marketing,
and Microsoft is king of that realm for a reason.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer
lifestyle gadget" or Apple announcing an enterprise server.

They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the company
DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

~~~
Arizhel
>Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer
lifestyle gadget"

What, you don't think the Zune was killer? /s

>They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the
company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

No, not really. I don't think it's even possible for a "lifestyle gadget" to
succeed as long as it has the "Microsoft" name on it, even if Apple secretly
designed it for them and MS seriously committed to it.

With the Zune, MS really was focused on making it succeed, and it still failed
miserably. As a company, they just don't "get it" (they don't understand what
it'd take to succeed in that market), plus their brand is a big negative in
that market. IIRC, the Zune didn't even have MS's name or logo on it anywhere,
so they even understood that much, but it still wasn't enough.

I think MS trying to make trendy consumer devices is a lot like Jeep trying to
make sporty electric cars. It just won't work; the company doesn't understand
the market and the consumers won't take the company seriously.

~~~
netzone
To be fair, the Zune was Steve Ballmers baby, I'm convinced Satya Nadella (I
thought it was a woman for the first year or so) would make a better product
in that regard.

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skdotdan
Copying Office and making it a webapp with less features is not killing
Office. Not even close.

Microsoft Office is legacy software. Its killer won't have anything to do
with, it will be totally different. For example, Slack.

I mean, killing PowerPoint is not making a webapp to create presentations, but
creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary.

Ideas: SaaS, ML, cloud dashboards and analytics, communication.

Credit: Benedict Evans.

~~~
tincholio
Slack will have a hard time killing office, seeing as MS Teams does pretty
much all that Slack does, and integrates with all the rest of Office 365.

~~~
astrodust
I'm not sure a lot of people that use Slack use Office. I know a lot that use
Slack + Google Docs almost exclusively.

It's a matter of tradition. Older firms with a large collection of native
Office documents need Office. Newer ones without that baggage can be more
adaptable.

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Bedon292
As much as it would be nice to have an alternative to MS Office, it seems like
a lot of these 'killers' focus on the wrong things that are needed.

1\. Completely offline use, including local save, backups etc. Which goes
completely against the cloud. But this is something that Microsoft got right
with 365. I can install it and use it completely isolated from the internet
and still collaborate online if needed.

2\. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like
that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these
things, and MS Office has them all built in.

3\. Suite interoperability. I need to be able to make a chart in Excel. Copy
and Paste (Ctrl+C/V, not some export process) it over to Word in the document,
then paste it into PowerPoint for the presentation. Or maybe save it out as a
PNG for Latex or something.

~~~
bradleyjg
"2\. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like
that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these
things, and MS Office has them all built in."

There are dozens of things like this for different niches. You need citation
tools, someone else couldn't do his job without pivot tables, someone else
uses imported shapes in powerpoint ten times a day, and so forth and so on.
That's a big reason that I'm skeptical anyone will be "killing" MS office
anytime soon.

~~~
Bedon292
Right, there are so many 'little' things in MS Office, that people use all the
time. It is likely that no one person is using all the features, but on any
given day all of the features are key to someone's job. And since they have
the home field advantage, it will be a long time before anyone can come close
to killing it.

~~~
amelius
That's the first time I read that "feature-creep" is actually a good thing :)

~~~
pacaro
It's complicated!

The crazy feature bloat is a real negative for Word, and yet also a huge
strength.

It's interesting look at documents produced and consumed by different
industries to get a real grasp on the variety of use cases

Oh, and a legal document written in Word 2.0 an æon ago needs to have every
word on the same line, and paginate identically on every subsequent version

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protomyth
"All applications running on AppStream are based in the cloud, so they require
_no processing power_ on the target device, with all resources, including
storage needs, provided by Amazon." \- italics added for emphasis

Has the author looked at the processing required by a modern web browser? This
is such a BS statement.

~~~
sp332
You don't need a powerful browser. AppStream runs the app on a server and the
client is just a thin client.
[https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/](https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/)

~~~
walterbell
Is this only for Windows apps with pixels and/or H.264 being streamed to an
HTML5 web client? Why would Amazon base a new product on Windows (UWP?)
instead of the web?

~~~
sp332
I don't know. Honestly I think the article is a shot in the dark.

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nolok
As a medium scale business user (<50 employees) of Office365 at one of my
companies, this is so much better than buying the old model of Office license
that it's obvious this turns profitable. Between the always updated, the no up
front payment, the ability to easily change your number of users, ... It's
simply a superior solution in every way for me.

I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a
lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore
the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as
possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on
occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a
functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that
I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before
self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super
super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms
going five years from now ?). Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the
tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business
decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still
very much trust them for services I pay.

~~~
DrScump

      always updated
    

... which is well-intended, but it scares me if that means that _all_ of my
installations have version updates _at the same time_ without manual
intervention or advance notification. What if there's a defect or an
introduced fail in backward compatibility? I'd be dead in the water.

Can you designate phased updates such that managers/leads are updated first,
followed by staged updates for the remainder (with manual on-demand update
available, of course)?

In my experience, there is too little attention given to backward
compatibility. Even we as customers are using a feature "incorrectly", it's
still a problem if your legacy code base (or applications and documents, in
the Office example) is broken by an unexpected update.

~~~
nolok
The last update, I was warned that an update would be rolled out to my users
before it started. I don't remember how long of a delay I had, I am certain I
could not schedule it to a time of my choosing BUT I could force it to happen
right now on a user by user basis. Which is what we ended up doing so as to
control our update time.

As for the backward compatibility, I agree in general but disagree about
office, or particularly about word and excel. Its support for legacy stuff is
insane, and a large part of why companies with lot of legacy stuff aren't
moving to another solution anytime soon.

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neovintage
Anything proclaiming its going to "kill" some other business, likely isn't.

Google Docs is a great example of solving a problem that carved out a
subsegment of Microsoft Office user base. I don't think any one solution is
going to be the all encompassing one like Office has been.

~~~
ghaff
Google Docs is great on a day-to-day basis. Has everything I routinely use and
is very streamlined. And I'm fine with firing something else up when I get out
of Google Docs' comfort zone.

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raesene6
Interesting, I'm guessing Amazon are doing this as they're concerned at
Microsoft getting companies onto Azure as part of a package with Office365.

Articles like this one ( [http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-
catch-up-t...](http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-to-
microsofts-enterprise-saas-cm763317) ) show that trend quite clearly

That said I'd think it'd be pretty tricky to get something that would compete
with Office. Replicating the basic functionality is likely do-able, but the
power user functionality of office can be pretty complex (e.g. Macros) and a
lot of users are quite attached to it.

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osullivj
Sun failed to pull this one off when they attempted to turn StarOffice into a
stick to beat MS. Yes, Google Docs have captured a lot of lightweight users.
But it will be tough to persuade power MS Office users to switch, especially
given the success of MS's switch to a subscription model.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Apple also made a run at Microsoft with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Apple is
known for intuitive user interfaces and they had some great looking templates
that made it easy to create professional documents. The problem is still
compatibility with Office. If you're not 100% compatible with the office file
format, you aren't going to seen as a viable alternative.

~~~
x0x0
well, there's also a giant functionality hole, at least for Numbers vs Excel

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kolbe
I just gave a book to one of my friends. Can someone write an article about
how I'm creating an "Amazon killer"

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systems
they should start with Excel ..

once they have a solid desktop excel replacement, that allow users to at least
import their excel sheets and have 100% of the functionality that had in
Excel, they have a Path, I think PowerPoint, Work, Access and Outlook are all
a lot easier to give up compared to Excel

Excel is IT/Computers for many users

~~~
nickpeterson
Honestly, excel is so hard to use once the scale reaches a few hundred million
that I was forced to build my own drastically scaled down version in order to
support my data analysis. It's an interesting project, and the source code
isn't too lengthy to get a reasonable amount of functionality.

I support a bunch of basic mathematic functions, and derived auto updating
columns. I also have some ability to import and export common formats. I'd
open source it but I don't want to open source my befunge interpretter which
is essential to running my business.

~~~
ghostly_s
Is this a late April Fools' joke? Your compiler for an esoteric programming
language; "the design goal [for which] was to create a language which was
difficult to compile"[1], is business-critical?

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge)

~~~
nickpeterson
The goal is to reduce everything. Complexity is uncertainty, at some point we
all throw up our hands and let the chips fall.

Every modern language compiles down to insane amounts of code. There is simply
no way it's all correct, even at the compiler level. The legion of developers
looking into it doesn't give me comfort either, because the size means it has
to be partitioned at some point.

Competitive edges are essential in the modern information economy. This
Bowling Alley succeeds or fails based on my own wits.

------
moomin
People always underestimate how much work it would be to properly compete with
Office. They tend to start with the view that 95% of users don't use 95% of
the features. They're right, but have completely missed the point: in an
enterprise environment those 5% will completely block adoption. In a bank, the
5% are the traders and the corporate financiers. Here's some Excel features
that I would consider essential for those people:

* Named Ranges * Array Evaluation * Running a calc on all cores (and don't make me laugh by having your engine in JS) * Charting (Office's is honestly not that great, it's amazing how many alternatives are even worse) * UI Automation (doesn't have to be VBA) * Reuters/Bloomberg prices (this one is hard to achieve on your own, obviously)

And that's less than the minimum of what you'd need for the average bank to
even _consider_ overcoming sunk costs, legacy implementations and sheer
inertia. And I've only talked about one app in the office suite.

Being cheaper and easier to deploy frankly ain't going to cut it.

~~~
jm__87
Ugh, I've worked at a few banks with a few diff trading desks and it is
annoying how much they love Excel. Excel is such a horrible platform for
anything other than some simple spreadsheets, but traders always find a way to
work it in to some production system at which point it becomes impossible to
remove.

~~~
moomin
Giving traders Visual Studio is actually remarkably effective...

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thraway2016
There already is an "Office Killer", called LibreOffice. Does absolutely
everything any small business or home user could ever need.

~~~
newscracker
I like LibreOffice and I support it with donations too, but many people are
already used to MS Office. And LibreOffice Calc, the one I use most, has big
time usability problems and bugs. It doesn't have the same keyboard shortcuts
as MS Excel. In fact, it chooses keyboard shortcuts that are very different
from MS Excel, making usage even more cumbersome even though it hasn't adopted
the Ribbon interface from MS and still has the standard pull down menus. It
still doesn't have copy paste working well (sometimes, whatever I copy from
another program cannot be pasted in it - this has been the case on Windows 7
and Windows 10 for at least a couple of years or longer across versions of
LibreOffice 4.x/5.x). In my limited experience, there is no true competitor
for MS Excel for those who have used MS Excel.

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013a
Amazon fundamentally does not understand UX. Office is too entrenched and
Google Drive has great UX. This product is dead on arrival.

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zebrafish
Spreadsheet functionality is not as intuitive or as seamless aaS as it is on
the desktop for whatever reason.

I also expect that any product without an on-prem option is going to lose out
in the enterprise space.

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nkristoffersen
Google docs(drive) is already the online killer. So much better than office
365. I doubt amazon can outdo google here.

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youdontknowtho
Of course they are, except that no one thinks that they will actually kill
Office. I'm sure that they can attract some users, but killing Office...Not
going to happen, and they are just using the notion as marketing for the
"anything but Microsoft" crowd that also happen to be early adopters.

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partiallypro
The real reason Amazon wants this is because they've seen Microsoft's cloud
growth from productivity software has been incredible and they sell it along
side their Azure offering. So far it's working, and AWS growth is slowing. The
cloud is eventually going to be a war of margins, and the margin on
productivity cloud software is more sticky than VMs, storage, etc.

It's also easier, imo to switch cloud providers than it is productivity
providers, there's no retraining and the average users across your
organization don't see the differences. A developer migrating a VM image and
storage accounts is much less of a hassle than having to potentially get IT
etc on board to retrain, answer questions, change user settings, deal with
complaints about a missing function, etc.

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vivekd
Why? Amazon already has a great and successful business model, why not focus
their efforts on expanding this model rather than trying to compete with
Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has domain and market mastery? Say what
you want about Microsoft, office is ubiquitous, their products are everywhere
- so why spend money, time and effort trying to beat them at their own game
rather than trying to expand their own core business.

~~~
chillacy
I once heard this theory: that companies release a free product in another
area (subsidized by their core business) in order to interfere with the
monopoly of another company. For instance Google makes their money in search
ads and has a free office suite and operating system. Microsoft makes their
money from their office suite and OS, and undercuts google with Bing.
Bing/Google Docs never really have to be #1, they just has to take enough
market share that the other company can't ignore it when it comes to pricing.

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saurik
I want Adobe to make a word processor and then an "operating system" by just
pulling a Google and branding Linux; the only non-gaming software that seems
to lock most people to Windows or macOS is Office/Work and "everything written
by Adobe", and Valve is totally ready to jump ship and the lock in of DirectX
is also dwindling in power... I think Adobe could pull it off.

~~~
nolok
See, I understand the wish to leave the windows lock-in behind, but I'm not
sure the alternative really exists yet.

"Raw" linux, even the likes of ubuntu, is not ready for it, I'm not even sure
it ever will be. No, I can't give my dad a linux box and expect him to read
the upgrade instruction when his distro moves to system.d or whatever, and fix
the likes of "can't update kernel because /boot is full". Of course to anyone
who knows anything even remotely about it those are trivial non issues, but to
my dad it's a complete show stopper.

On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use linux
we have in android or chromeos, well, ... Sure, the code is a lot more open
source and yada yada, but while I can do whatever I want on my windows box, I
suddenly need to hope there is a way to root my own phone/tablet for lots of
stuff. That is definitely _not_ where I want my computer to go.

Disclaimer: I'm a happy windows user at home, and linux at work. And my phone
is Android. I'm not bashing here.

~~~
ekidd
> On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use
> linux we have in android or chromeos, well, ...

The new hybrid Android / ChromeOS systems like Samsung's Chromebook Plus are
surprisingly useable as low-end laptops. Chrome is fully operational, and you
have Google Docs. You also have the entire Android ecosystem, which gets you
things like the Kindle reader. And I can confirm that Termux
([https://termux.com/](https://termux.com/)) works fine, so you can get a
basic command-line without rooting the machine.

If you want a light, expendable travel system, or a gift for somebody who
wants a computer that "just works", it's a surprisingly viable option.

~~~
nolok
Oh I don't mean they don't work, they work very well in my opinion. What I
meant was that, while "open" as in open source is very important to us as
developers, I feel like open as in "it's your computer and you do whatever you
want with it" is just as important, and it's often a neglected criteria, and I
feel this is one of the things where there is little if any competition to
windows that is ready for prime time.

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5555624
I use Office at work. Through Microsoft's Home Use Program (HUP) I can buy a
copy for home. As long as I can buy a copy for $9.95 -- I've bought the last
four versions through HUP -- Amazon doesn't stand a chance. Neither does
LibreOffice, even though I've installed it on a FreeBSD laptop and other
computers.

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alexcroox
The trouble with Amazon is everything that isn't their retail site has
terrible UX so I'm not hopeful.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Their software also tends to be very crashy and/or slow. It's like Apple
software for Windows, but worse.

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clavalle
Why?

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turowicz
So much for making presentations on the plane.

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taksintikk
Seems like a futile venture.

There are bigger fish to fry.

