
Microsoft Changes Tack, Making Office Suite Free on Mobile - shitehawk
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/technology/microsoft-to-give-away-mobile-version-of-office-software.html?src=twr&_r=0
======
localhost
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.

~~~
tkubacki
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).

~~~
Devthrowaway80
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.

~~~
300bps
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.

~~~
zmonkeyz
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.

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cowabunga
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.

~~~
ctdonath
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.

~~~
zacharycohn
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...](http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money-
updated-2012/)).

~~~
ctdonath
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.

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atwebb
>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.

~~~
spydum
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](http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/ms_numbers.pdf)

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jobu
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.

~~~
izacus
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.

~~~
icehawk219
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.

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

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johnloeber
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.

~~~
WWKong
Product cycles are much much longer. So, no.

~~~
JeffreyKaine
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.

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ladzoppelin
“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.

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dcw303
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.

------
ape4
I still prefer LibreOffice
[http://www.libreoffice.org/](http://www.libreoffice.org/)

~~~
k-mcgrady
LibreOffice runs on mobile devices?

~~~
edent
There is an Android port. It is... Interesting.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenof...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenoffice)

~~~
k-mcgrady
...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.

~~~
ygra
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.

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gentlebend
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.

~~~
m_mueller
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?

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anilshanbhag
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.

~~~
sheetjs
> 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

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

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

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

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annamarie
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/...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2014/11/05/microsoft-
announces-major-update-to-azure-sql-database-adds-free-tier-to-azure-machine-
learning.aspx)

------
jadavis
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.)

~~~
Elepsis
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).

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jangid
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.

------
NicoJuicy
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.

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hnriot
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.

~~~
jongalloway2
Office and Office.com / OneDrive have had collaborative document editing for a
while. Not sure about the mobile apps.

------
yantramanav
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.

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

------
jdorfman
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.

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

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

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

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

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

[1] NSA partner

[2] You

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

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

;)

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

~~~
Cuuugi
If you own a cell phone, you already have.

~~~
modifier
You shouldn't parade your ignorance.

~~~
Cuuugi
It's clearly being upstaged by yours.

