
Office 365 is now on Mac App Store - markwhiting
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/the-mac-app-store-welcomes-office-365/
======
killion
I'm wondering if it's worth uninstalling Office and reinstalling. If it uses
the App Store update mechanism instead of Microsoft Autoupdate I would prefer
it. Autoupdate presents a window almost every time a launch an Office
application.

~~~
ld00d
My favorite is when autoupdate is done updating, it runs a check to see if
anything needs to be updated, and then it reports to me that there's nothing
to update.

~~~
Arn_Thor
Apple software does the same on Windows..

~~~
gaius
I got my iTunes on Windows via Microsoft’s App Store ironically. It’s
seemingly the only way to get iCloud working properly on Windows, they share
certain common components.

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ghshephard
The million (10 million? 100 Million) dollar question that I haven't seen
addressed yet (but I'm sure will be, if it hasn't already) - is what % cut
Apple is getting from the subscription revenue.

~~~
excalibur
> Users can also purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps,
> so they can get up and running instantly.

This would tend to suggest that Apple isn't getting a cut. Normally when they
take one, it's on the basis of funds being transferred via their store, which
doesn't appear to be the case here. But this is a massive deal between two of
the ecosystem's biggest fish, and I'm sure an arrangement has been made to
give Apple a piece of the pie somehow.

~~~
r00fus
No, I think Apple will get a cut, but only a marginal one - probably a "better
than Netflix" % deal, and definitely not the standard 30%.

Favorability in negotiation terms usually tend to be proportional to the size
of the parties involved.

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mark_l_watson
There are some services that are so worth the money that I am happy to pay
for: Office 365, Dropbox, and GSuite.

I am as much of a cheapskate as the next guy, but it makes sense to pay for
services that help get work done and/or make life easier.

I am curious if Microsoft is paying Apple a 30% cut, or if they got a better
deal.

~~~
taftster
How many licenses of GSuite to you maintain? One license, $5 / month. Seems
reasonable.

I have six family members. $360 / year for GSuite, that's untenable to me.

~~~
wp381640
I paid $400+ a year for personal accounts since GSuite went premium. I just
switched over to another provider because I reached a tipping point of not
being able to tolerate GSuite support - it is horrible. horrible. horrible.
horrible. Took 1+ and 3+ weeks to resolve the only two minor issues we've ever
had.

Support replies were a series of unrelated prefilled replies, it seems whoever
is on the other end is just keen to reply with whatever asap (phone is no
better)

I don't think i've ever given Microsoft a dollar in my life but i'm strongly
considering purchasing their email hosting based on feedback from companies I
know using it. I don't mind paying for things, I hate paying for things and
then not getting what was advertised.

~~~
shimms
Have you checked out Fastmail? Whilst I use and pay for Office 365 for
business, my personal email is on Fastmail (migrated from Gmail after a decade
with them) and very happy with it.

~~~
taftster
$5/user/month with a custom domain. It's the same pricing as GSuite. Just
doesn't reflect the right price point for me.

By the way, how is Fastmail's spam filtering? Gmail/GSuite is probably the
best, and one of my concerns would be going back to the days of seeing
enlargement products in my inbox.

~~~
jammygit
They thrown in 'not data mining you' for free though

~~~
josefresco
No data mining with G Suite.

[https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-
pdfs/goo...](https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/google-
cloud-security-and-compliance-whitepaper.pdf)

~~~
jammygit
The specific claim, unless I missed it, is no data collection for advertising
purposes (page 12 and also in their other privacy policy online). That doesn't
stop them from other uses of the data. Microsoft makes a similar claim with
some of its telemetry. Or did I miss something? It was a long PDF, I just
skimmed it

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npunt
Big move. I see this potentially as groundwork for the eventual integration of
Mac and iOS App Stores, which you have to imagine is something Apple wants in
the years ahead as platforms converge on common software stack and UX. It's
also a signal that the App Store team may now be willing to do the deals
necessary to attract MacOS apps back toward this larger strategic initiative
(vs just trying to maximize revenue).

From Microsoft's perspective, now that Windows is sidelined, Office is their
primary consumer platform and that means UX outweighs any strategic tax of
trying to make the Windows version better.

Have you tried to download Office from their website? It's a horrible,
braindead experience. You have to log in to your Live account, then go to a
particular page to manage your existing Office installs that is super
confusing. Coupled with the poor autoupdate UX on Mac [1], and it's almost
like Microsoft doesn't want you to have Office on Mac.

I think the issue finally reached a breaking point there and they shifted to
UX > control. This is a positive shift for them, since being on the App Store
means features ship faster and users see value in their Office subscription.
Aside from update UX this is obviously a way to bump their Mac Office numbers.
Seems like a good play from both Apple & Microsoft's perspective.

[1] Right now Microsoft's autoupdate UX is pretty terrible at keeping things
up to date. When I visit my parents, they're almost always several versions
behind, and as another commenter pointed out, a decent part of that is the
autoupdate needing to update itself. They have automated updates but its hard
to trust that process won't result in issues when documents are open, and it
presents a lot of cognitive load to users on top of the OS & App Store
updates.

~~~
zapzupnz
> which you have to imagine is something Apple wants in the years ahead as
> platforms converge on common software stack and UX

I don't think we have to imagine that. Apple's been against that sort of thing
for a long time, and I don't see that changing any time soon. They don't
target the lowest common denominator.

I suppose that the Marzipan project, of iOS frameworks on macOS, should prove
me wrong but I still don't think so. The few apps that Apple has given us are
... kinda bad. Their non-nativeness screams out: they don't respond properly
to gestures, many macOS Services don't work in them, and the user interfaces
are laggy.

Yes, I suppose things will change with the next version of macOS, but there's
no real way to avoid the fact that UIKit on macOS doesn't make proper macOS
apps --- and developers will have to decide what matters more; time to market
or customer satisfaction.

I'm fairly sure Marzipan is a stopgap, not a platform unto itself. Get your
iOS apps running on macOS, and slowly move them to native macOS paradigms.

I'm actually hoping that things like Office 365, Lightroom CC (and perhaps the
other Adobe apps), BBEdit, etc. help developers see the potential of proper
macOS apps (I'll take these big developers' emulations of Cocoa over UIKit-on-
macOS any day), and smaller developers will follow suit.

(And if their code is MVC-compliant in the Cocoa way, that should't be too big
an issue; you can mix and match views and controllers from AppKit and UIKit!)

> Have you tried to download Office from their website?

If you have an Office 365 account, all you need to do is go to office.com,
sign in, and there's a big friendly "Install Office" button right there. But I
do generally agree that there is too much friction getting this "must-have"
piece of software; I don't care for Office much, but denying its influence and
widespread usage is a task best relegated to those who think everybody should
write in LaTeX.

~~~
npunt
1\. Go to Office365.com

2\. Login

3\. Do you want to stay logged in?

4\. Is your information up to date?

5\. Office / OneCloud homepage ("Good evening"). Press 'Install Office' (its a
secondary/white button that blends into background, whereas 'New doc' is a
blue button).

(20 URL redirects)

6\. Installs page. Press 'Install Office' again.

7\. Still Installs page, now with banner that says 'Your Office 365
subscription info has moved to account.microsoft.com. Now there's one place to
manage all your subscriptions'. No download happens when you press 'Install
Office'. No actual link to account.microsoft.com.

8\. Go to account.microsoft.com. No download button.

 _I 'm literally unable to download the Office dmg right now._ Also, this is
the improved interface. The prior one from last year was even less clear,
except for the fact I could download it.

Most other apps have a 1-click download button on their homepage, and guide
you through the login/reg process when you launch the app. Oh, that's right,
Office ALSO does that, in addition to the aforementioned steps. It's
braindead.

I think companies sometimes acknowledge that they've screwed up so badly that
they need to rethink how they do things. Microsoft demonstrated willingness to
do that since Satya became CEO and have shifted the entire company strategy
away from Windows, killing a sacred cow. Whether or not that's what's going on
behind the scenes here, the end user experience is severely improved going to
App Store.

Regarding UIKit, yes the current Marzipan apps suck, all four of them. They're
not mainline apps by any stretch of the imagination, and none were previously
on the Mac. They'll get better. Just because Marzipan/UIKit _today_ doesn't
have good MacOS affordances doesn't mean it won't in the future, especially
since it's not even being offered to developers right now. I don't see why
it's difficult to see where the puck is going here. There's certainly some
implementation details to work out, but it's better for the ecosystem as a
whole - users, devs, and Apple - to have a single framework in the long run.
Were you making something from scratch you certainly wouldn't make two
frameworks.

To be specific, Apple has been against a 2-in-1 style product. I'm not
advocating that, sorry to have caused confusion. I'm saying they'll have same
underlying tech (UIKit/marizpan), but different end-user UX affordances based
on mouse vs touch.

Remember that iPad is as large a market as Mac right now, and is moving
upmarket and attracting more pro apps. There are also way more iOS devs than
MacOS devs, 10:1 or 100:1. Devs making technical decisions about Apple
ecosystem products right now should be getting the hint, and if they're not
they likely will this June at WWDC. Apple doesn't tend to lurch around on
product decisions, almost everything they do is a multi-year strategy executed
in well-telegraphed steps.

~~~
brianpgordon
> Office365

There's your problem right there. Just buy a perpetual Office license. The
awful Adobe-style subscription model for desktop software that barely ever
changes is _ridiculous_.

~~~
zapzupnz
There are other aspects to Office 365 that are quite valuable to people, like
a huge increase in the size of their OneDrive storage quotas, the ability to
install Office on multiple devices rather than just one (which is pretty
common; people install Office apps connected to their 365 accounts on their
mobiles, tablets, etc.), Skype airtime, technical support beyond the first 60
days of purchase, and with certain plans you can share these benefits with a
certain number of people.

Aside from that, many businesses with specific Office 365 packages get a
number of licences (sometimes unlimited) to assign to staff; so people don't
have to buy Office, they get it "free" from work and can install it on
something like five or ten devices. Same goes for educational institutions;
I'm a teacher, so all the staff AND the students get free access to Office
365, and all the complicated businessy things like Active Directory profiles,
SharePoint, Teams (MS' answer to Slack), and so on is included with the same
account that I use to install Office on my home Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

So for plenty of people, benefitting from the subscription service in this
way, Office is free - no need to buy a perpetual licence.

It's not ridiculous. It might be for your use case, but you can't make a
blanket statement that covers everybody.

~~~
brianpgordon
Well, maybe two different things have gotten conflated here. What I'm calling
ridiculous is the fact that Microsoft is charging a subscription for Office.
The flexibility to install on multiple devices is something that shouldn't be
tied to a subscription license in the first place. And neither is more
OneDrive space (why you'd _want_ OneDrive space in the first place is a
separate issue) or Skype airtime. It also doesn't make sense to me why you
think it's a good thing that your Office account is the same as for AD and
SharePoint and Teams... this is an offline desktop office suite - what does a
Microsoft account have to do with it anyway?

I feel like Microsoft noticed how Adobe was making money hand over fist by
moving Creative Suite to a subscription model and wanted in on the action. Of
course everyone hates Adobe's awful subscription model, but it doesn't matter-
if you have to have Photoshop then you're going to pay whatever they ask. But
this is not a good thing.

Basically what I'm saying is that rushing to defend Microsoft's licensing
model doesn't make any sense. This is a step back in every way from the world
where you buy a license and don't have to keep paying the vendor month after
month for them to do little more than refrain from shutting down access to
software already on your computer. If you want Skype and OneDrive (again,
why?) then fine, but the fact that that's bundled is not a good thing.

~~~
zapzupnz
Firstly, Office 365 is not just offline apps. It’s software as a service; it’s
a suite of high-quality online tools that rapidly approach parity with their
product to flint counterparts, it’s being able to install multiple copies of
Office in multiple devices without needing to purchase more product keys; it’s
about being able to use the mobile apps without paying for those separately
(which people just won’t); it’s about reducing piracy for MS by allowing
organisations and educational instituons to provide Office 365 to employees
and students; there are so many advantages to Microsoft __and __consumers.

I am not “rushing” to defend anything, merely pointing out the benefits. What
you call a step back, others call a blessing. I genuinely prefer to pay a
relatively low fee for access to essential data in the cloud _and_ the high-
quality tools that I can access anywhere to work with my documents,
collaborate, and even automate with online add-ons. All without worrying about
what platform I’m using (desktop, mobile, web, Windows, macOS, Linux), licence
keys (which demonstrably don’t work; Genuine Office got cracked every five
minutes, and piracy was rampant).

I find your apparent incredulity at other people’s potential desire for
certain aspects of a product(S) or service(s) is symptomatic of a refusal to
even attempt to understand other people’s priorities when it comes to
technology, something I’ve written about at length on HN before. Don’t write
off my input just because your priorities don’t match mine or others,
dismissively calling my five cents but a “rush”.

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freehunter
Is this the mobile version of the apps, a wrapper around the web version of
the apps, or actual full-fledged desktop Office?

~~~
Tomte
Desktop Office. Microsoft has been offering a "real office" on Mac for many,
many years now. The news is not that Office is on Mac, it's that it is
distributed through the App Store.

~~~
freehunter
I knew they've had full Office since forever. I just didn't know if the App
Store version itself was full Office or a mobile/web Office like on the iOS
App Store.

~~~
phs318u
According to this post [0], Microsoft use a "shared Office codebase for
Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android". Before the individual iOS Office apps,
Microsoft had an "Office mobile" app which may well have been a web app
(though I can't find anything on that either way).

[0]
[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Share...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Shared-
Office-codebase-for-Windows-Mac-iOS-and-Android-means/ba-p/150291)

~~~
zapzupnz
I believe it was indeed a web app. The efforts to get a shared code base began
in earnest after Nadella took over as CEO at MS, and Office stopped being a
means to sell copies of Windows and rather a chargeable service unto itself -
I believe the shared codebase first started to surface in the apps for iOS and
Android.

Well, I say that. Really, the Windows and macOS version had been sharing code
for ages, but plenty of it was still bespoke for macOS. I think their rewrite
to Cocoa, which I believe happened around the same time as the iOS apps
started being developed, helped to bring further parity.

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misterbwong
PSA: iTunes gift cards can usually be had for a discount (generally 15%, maybe
more) so you can save some $ with this move.

~~~
swarnie_
Are you saying you can buy $100 iTunes gift cards for $85 dollars? That's
kinda sketchy....

~~~
dewey
There are a lot of deals like that from time to time and it's not sketchy.

[https://www.imore.com/thrifter-deal-score-50-itunes-gift-
car...](https://www.imore.com/thrifter-deal-score-50-itunes-gift-card-40-best-
buy-right-now)

~~~
swarnie_
Thanks, i had no idea.

I assumed this was similar to Amazon cards in the UK ie a great way to quickly
move money off a stolen credit card with only a 20-30% laundering cost.

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deca6cda37d0
This very good for Mac admins of any kind of organisation that uses MDM.
Finally just push those apps to the users from the server. If Adobe Creative
Cloud could be downloaded from the Mac App Store it would be perfect.

Now I use homebrew to install lots of software and fonts internally.

------
walterbell
Can you pay to use the app for only one or two months? Or does it requiring
subscribing and cancelling?

~~~
ixxivvix
You have to subscribe and then unsubscribe manually. Apparently the Mac App
Store version only offers yearly subscriptions, but the iOS version still
offers monthly options so you can use your phone if you personally don’t want
to pay through Microsoft’s store

~~~
walterbell
Thank you for documenting the fine print.

------
intopieces
Very pleased to be able to download just Microsoft Word from the store. It
does seem snappier than the previous version. Sidenote, I use MS Word for one
thing only, and that's Chinese homework. Are there any other word processors
that do Pinyin well? I'll pay.

------
pkamb
Is it sandboxed?

~~~
abrowne
My question exactly: did MS change Office to get in the Mac App Store rules or
did Apple change the MAS rules to get Office in?

~~~
dg246
Neither. The existing Office desktop apps are already sandboxed.

------
dstroot
I uninstalled and then used homebrew and mas to install. Now I think 100% of
my software is installed via homebrew. Nice!

------
fock
Just after some random outage in Europe yesterday. Wonder why this get's up
the front page today...

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tr33house
Big question is, when is it coming to Linux

------
krembo
Office was available for Mac for many years. The news here is that Office is
now in the Mac App Store, not that big of a news. Anyhow, worth noting that
the Mac versions of Office are no near to the Windows versions. They are thin
clients with only a portion of the win capabilities, and those which exists
are buggy, to say the least.

If I had a Mac, I would go to G Suite, which gives _better_ capabilities for
99.9% of the users, and if I was on the .1% I would go and buy a PC.

* BTW- Wine 4 was released this week, and they also don't support any of the O365 apps, especially not their 64bit versions.

~~~
tphan
I use both Office for Mac and Windows all the time and Office for Mac is
pretty reliable IMO. They pretty much have feature parity. Which features are
you missing?

~~~
peteretep
Is MS Access still missing?

~~~
sigzero
Yes, I believe there are no plans to get Access to work on macOS.

~~~
innocentoldguy
I believe that is a good thing. I used to work at Microsoft and many of their
own employees hate Access and wish Microsoft would have replaced it with
Foxpro when they bought that back in the 90s.

