
Microsoft Office Mobile arrives for iOS - RobAley
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/hell-freezes-over-microsoft-office-mobile-arrives-for-ios/
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josteink
Hm. Clever strategy releasing only for Office 365 customers first.

Microsoft is clearly aware that most people with a tablet already have
something by Apple or an Android device and that trying to use Office to sell
them a Windows RT device isn't going to work.

However enticing organizations to "upgrade" to Office 365 (which comes with a
regular subscription fee and better long term profits) to get a version for
the tablet they already have might actually move some 365-licenses.

I say they are making the best of the situation.

~~~
zuppy
I understood that it's only for iPhone. I hope they're not sacrificing office
sales, just to force you to buy RT. It's not yet available for me so I can't
check that.

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nwh
I struggle with the move towards everything being subscription based. Very
quickly it becomes difficult to quantify just how much it is costing to own,
and maintain ownership of a license for a piece of software.

If I see an application that is $50, I can quickly quantify that into hours I
need to work for this to be paid off. I can compare the value I am getting to
the amount of currency that I expend on it. I know that if I need to in the
future, it will always be there for me to rely on.

If I see a service that is $12 a month it becomes a much harder game. Sure it
might be worth it for the first month, but the second one becomes a much
harder decision. Do I unsubscribe, and lose all the data that I have stores,
or do I pay another $12 and hope that it continues to be useful to me in the
future? In the future I might need to sign up again, which is a lot more
hassle than it is worth.

All of these "small" subscriptions are beginning to cost me more than I'd
like.

~~~
smackfu
It really depends on what the prices are. With your example, it's obviously a
bad deal. But in this case, Office 365 is $150 a year ($12.50 per month),
while the packaged version of Office Professional is $400. So you get a good
2.5 years of use out of it before the curves cross.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
I'm still running Office 2007. Bought it for $50 as a student and it's still
fine.

~~~
bentcorner
I recall reading somewhere that Office's biggest competitor was its previous
version.

~~~
wmeredith
This is most definitely true for Microsoft and Adobe. Hence, they're both
switching to subscription models.

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nostromo
I wish Microsoft had decided to separate into several companies way back
during the US v. Microsoft case.

Office is actually a great product and Excel in particular still is the best
available spreadsheet around. But Office has been hamstrung by being part of
Microsoft; in particular by not supporting iOS or Android or online (until
being forced to). If Office was its own company, I'm sure these platforms
would have been supported years ago.

I feel like Microsoft is one of the rare cases where the whole is actually
less than the sum of its parts.

~~~
bornhuetter
Office would do well without the rest of Microsoft (in fact possibly even
better), but I'm not sure the rest of Microsoft would do well without Office.
Office is a huge stable cash-cow that allows Microsoft to experiment on things
like Kinect without having to worry if they aren't always profitable.

You could argue the same thing with Apple and iOS. iOS would be better if it
weren't so tied to OS X, but I'm not sure the rest of Apple would be in
anywhere near the same position (or even still around) if it weren't for the
big iOS and iPod cashcows.

~~~
tambourine_man
_iOS would be better if it weren 't so tied to OS X_

Why is that?

~~~
bornhuetter
Two main reasons:

1\. If people could develop for it on other platforms it would significantly
increase the number of people able to write iOS apps globally, particularly
people from lower socio-economic groups. In the short term it doesn't make a
big difference, but there are millions of people in India and China that can't
afford even an entry level Mac, and I think in the long run this is
detrimental to the ecosystem.

2\. Many iOS services are tied into the Apple ecosystem, such as messages,
notes, facetime etc. If they weren't using iOS to try to get people onto OSX
then these services would be more likely to be cross platform and therefore
far more useful.

~~~
tambourine_man
I think it's more of a push to full stack Apple-only solution than being tied
to OS X.

I wish Apple cared for OS X that much.

~~~
bornhuetter
It's the same problem with Office. MS are using Office to help keep big
business on a full MS stack - Windows, Sharepoint, Windows Server etc. And
it's business that really matters to Microsoft. If Office were to be split
off, they would be more likely put it on all smartphones, Linux, write a
better OSX version etc, but it could weaken Microsoft's position wrt its other
products.

It would probably be great for consumers if these companies took the attitude
of making their products work _best_ in a full stack, but still play nicely
with everyone else's products, but they seem believe (rightly or wrongly) that
it is in their own best interest to push for vertical integration and implicit
or explicit lock-in.

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mikek
The pricing makes sense. But not from the perspective of what's best for
Office. It makes sense in that Microsoft doesn't want Apple to take a 30% cut.

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Ologn
With regards to the mentions of Office and Excel on Android...

Android spreadsheets which are Excel compatible are something I am interested
in. There's a few options - Documents To Go, Quickoffice, Olive Office...

Two years ago I started to write a spreadsheet which could handle Excel format
on Android without network access. I used the Apache POI libraries. I could
handle pre-2007 Excel files OK (XLS), but post-2007 (XLSX) was more of a
challenge. I learned the hard way of Android's famous 2^16 methods per Dalvik
executable file limit while doing the project, and discovery of the existence
of that limitation put the project on an indefinite hiatus. I tried to get
around the problem - I pulled a lot out of the schema but it was still over
the 65536 method limit. One option available would be custom class loading of
multiple Dex files, which would be a pain. Another possibility is some kind of
cloud solution where XLSX files would be uploaded to a server - something I
have little interest in.

The remnants of my project are here -
[http://bit.ly/1abDbhK](http://bit.ly/1abDbhK) \- although there is not much
there, just a very, very bare skeleton of a spreadsheet which can handle XLS
(pre-2007 Excel) files. I have to update the README though since the API of
the Apache POI libraries have changed - it still works with the archived and
still downloadable, circa-June-2011 POI libraries though.

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pixie_
Nice, and they already styled it to look like iOS 7!

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andrewgleave
It will look perfectly at home on iOS 7.

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emehrkay
Is Apple setting up iWork for iCloud (very Microsoft-y naming here)
subscription based or free if you happen to have an iCloud account? I ask
because these two applications/SOCs would be direct competitors with MS having
the advantage

~~~
Terretta
iWork applications and apps are paid but dirt cheap, cloud sync is free for
first 5GB storage. Pages handles MS Word formats well, even full "track
changes" interop from iPad, so you can round trip office docs from a train.

~~~
bornhuetter
> Pages handles MS Word formats well

Does it? The people that I've known to try this have all complained to me
about problems. Not sure if this is a compatibility issue or Pages itself (and
not sure if it's just my small sample of friends).

~~~
parasubvert
Long time Pages user - It does handle Word reasonably well, just as Numbers
handles Excel, and Keynote handles PPT. But as with most import/export
functionality it has quirks so that you cannot use it exclusively. It is not
useless, but not perfect. Depends on the document.

I'd say Keynote<\-->PPT is the best of the bunch, followed by Pages<->Word.
VBA Excel macros are hard to port.

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outside1234
Microsoft is opening up - Linux VMs, SDKs for Android / iOS, Office
everywhere. The religion has been cast off (finally) at Microsoft and its
going where the developers and users are.

~~~
bornhuetter
I'd love it if that were true, but I'm not sure how much has really changed.

They have always allowed Windows to run in a VM on Linux - it's just the
special free VM packages that didn't run on Linux before.

They have also always had Office on Mac - it's the best way to make sure no
other office suite can get off the ground, and makes Office documents more
industry standard.

If they were to release Office for Linux, then _that_ would be something.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Doesn't Libre Office do pretty well in the Linux space?

~~~
bornhuetter
It does do well, and for personal use it's fine (far better than Open Office
ever was), but it's just not on the same level as MS Office. When you start
getting into document tracking or Macros things start to break down, and the
general usability is not as good - especially for Excel vs Calc.

I'm happy with Gimp for image manipulation and indie games (I've got a 3DS and
a Windows partition on my desktop for that), but I still boot into Windows or
fire up a VM on my laptop to run MS Office (or watch Netflix).

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bornhuetter
If only Microsoft released Office for Linux and Apple let OSX run (in a VM or
otherwise) on non-Apple hardware the world would be a much better place.

~~~
k-mcgrady
If Apple let OS X run on other hardware the OS would suffer with them having
to spend time supporting so many different configurations. If they didn't
their reputation would suffer.

Microsoft building Office for Linux would be a complete waste of time and
money. The majority of Linux users would complain that it was expensive,
closed source, and continue using the free, open alternatives.

~~~
freyrs3
> The majority of Linux users would complain that it was expensive, closed
> source, and continue using the free, open alternatives.

I don't know what you're user base you're sampling but the vast majority of
Linux users are not opposed to closed source ( Steam, VMWare, Humble Bundle )
and are quite willing to pay for quality software.

~~~
mwfunk
It's hard to say. I get the sense that there's a huge disconnect between the
demographics of all Linux users, and the impression one might get of those
demographics by doing a survey of blogs, forums, mailing lists, online polls,
etc.

For example, if you just read the most popular Linux forums, you could easily
get the impression that every single Linux user despises Ubuntu with every
fiber in the fabric of their being, and that they would never use any closed
source product under any circumstances, and that they would only consider
paying for anything if what they were paying was itself 100% open source.

As far as I can tell, though, that's not necessarily the case at all, with the
Steam/VMWare/Humble Bundle cases being well-known counterexamples. As far as I
can tell, nobody really knows. The Humble Bundle cases are interesting because
Linux users have historically paid more than users from other platforms, on
average, but is that because most Linux users want more closed source Linux
software, or is it because a subset of Linux users want to encourage more
closed source, and are voting with their wallets to demonstrate that?

Anyway, nobody knows. But if you are correct that the vast majority of Linux
users are not opposed to closed source, then that would imply that pretty much
the entire online Linux community is a hugely disproportionate
misrepresentation of Linux users as a whole. Given that Linux as a platform is
far more reliant on having a healthy online community than other platforms,
that would be a big problem. However, my gut feeling is that you are correct,
and that the online Linux community is a vastly disproportionate subset of
Linux users, and that it's unfortunate that the online community is so
dominated by one particular type of user.

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marban
Does anyone have any insights on who really uses these kinds of apps on their
phone (and how)? Whether it's MSO, iWork or GDocs I can't find any productive
use for them other than a quick lookup. Even editing a simple 10 page document
is just a huge pain and there's really no piece of mind that it'll look good
on a desktop device.

~~~
rednukleus
Corporate types like to be able to read documents sent to them via email on
the train or in the pub. I have seen an impressive number of edits done to
documents and long emails typed on blackberrys by people in the pub in the
past.

The process will be much more reliable on an official MS set of apps, and for
many companies that's worth a _lot_ of money.

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jmspring
Hell freezes over? The trade press has mentioned this was in the works for
awhile.

Microsoft actually makes some decent iOS apps. A company of 100k will have
different groups with different beliefs/approaches. It's like the thread
earlier this week about a particular person's experience with the group he was
in after 8mo.

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smoser
Being a 'free' download looks like a good compromise for Microsoft and bad for
users. Apple wasn't going to make a pricing exception for Microsoft (30% to
Apple). So Microsoft just shifts the 'purchase' to the web.

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wikwocket
Now if we could just get Google to play nice and release apps for Windows
Phone...

~~~
thurn
I expect BlackBerry apps would be first, since they still have the larger
market share [1].

[1]:
[http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816](http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2482816)

~~~
josefresco
The numbers are trending in MS's favor. Q12012 share for BB was 6.8 now only
3. Windows Phone in Q12012 was 1.9, now 2.9

Not rocket growth but the trend clearly points to MS being the _weak_ #3.

Not sure how the existing install base for both effects this conclusion. Sales
are only 1 piece of the puzzle.

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daigoba66
It should be noted that this is apparently an iPhone-only only app in terms of
resolution. Which kind of makes it not super useful (in addition to requiring
an Office 365 subscription).

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sidcool
Highly editorialized title. It was quite an expected move.

~~~
xaritas
It's an allusion to Steve Jobs' somewhat notorious "hell froze over"
introduction to iTunes for Windows, from 10 years ago (... wow). This was also
a widely anticipated introduction but it still seemed a little subversive.

[http://news.cnet.com/Apple-launches-iTunes-for-
Windows/2100-...](http://news.cnet.com/Apple-launches-iTunes-for-
Windows/2100-1041_3-5092414.html)

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parad0x1
Their commercial stating that the iPad can't have Office just became obsolete.

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corresation
Some 600 million iOS devices have been sold. Microsoft is ultimately a
software company (despite the recent "ape what Apple does" corporate
direction. Microsoft would be worth treble if it diverged into self-interested
divisions years ago), and this makes complete sense.

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rogerchucker
$80 subscription for Office 365 is too expensive for someone on a student's
budget.

~~~
objclxt
Sorry, $80 for a _four year_ subscription? Because that's what the Office 365
for Students deal is. That's $1.66 per month.

Seems pretty in-budget for a student.

~~~
rogerchucker
Then charge us per month - don't ask for a freaking down payment.

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thornad
Does it have an NSA backdoor?

