
Office 2016 Is Microsoft's Best Hope to Show It's Changed - howsilly
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/office-2016-microsofts-best-hope-show-really-changed/
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makecheck
It's certainly changed but the question is if it's better.

I did play with the beta version of Mac Word and it was beautiful but buggy
right up until the last release. And honestly, I was editing primarily
_bulleted lists_ and was _enraged_ that it somehow to this day couldn't do
that consistently (copy/paste across lines does unexpected things, indentation
seems to differ on every single line, and the, er, list goes on).

And then the final version came and a LOG-IN screen appeared after Word's
characteristically-long launch (presumably because they have to launch an
entire Windows VM or something on the Mac). That's it; you can't do anything
else. So I enter what I think is my log-in ID and password and it sits there
spinning for a LONG time with no functional way to cancel aside from force-
quitting, and then it eventually says the log-in is incorrect. Apparently I
needed some other account but it wouldn't tell me why my choice didn't work.

So, Office became pretty but worse in every practical respect and _far worse_
in some brand new ways. Seems to me Microsoft is about the same it has always
been.

~~~
IMcD23
Office for Mac OS has been around for longer than Office for Windows. It is
all developed natively and is not as you said, a Windows VM running it.

~~~
e40
Agreed. I've been running the Mac OS X Offce 365 for a couple of months. It's
native and very Mac like. Excel has crashed a few times on me, which is what I
use mostly. It's downloaded large updates 3-4 times. I haven't noticed crashes
after the last update.

~~~
makecheck
It doesn't crash but it doesn't behave the way it ought to.

If I'm performing simple text edits I shouldn't be surprised by _anything_
it's doing in terms of formatting. And if I have to wait several seconds for
it to open a trivial document in _its own file format_ that even _TextEdit_
can open immediately, that's a problem.

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buffoon
The marketing of "we are sorry and we are listening to our users" which turned
out to be a load of crap when Windows 10 came out turned me off to any
promises made in the future.

~~~
agumonkey
They do listen though.

~~~
JimmaDaRustla
Windows 7 was the turning point I remember, when Gates came back to make up
for Vista and they took every piece of feedback possible.

~~~
Someone1234
Windows 7 was just a re-badged Vista with a sprinkling of new features. None
of the criticisms that people try and lay at Vista's feat are untrue about
Windows 7.

Vista largely got criticised for:

\- Higher memory usage (than XP).

\- Driver issues (in particular graphics and sound). Because Microsoft made
changes to the Windows Driver Model, and big name manufacturers (Nvidia,
Creative, et al) weren't ready at release, and produced either buggy drivers,
or no drivers at all.

The reason why Windows 7 was better received is:

\- It wasn't called "Vista." It was/is fashionable to bash Vista. They could
have literally re-released Vista without one change and it still would have
been treated better than Vista was (which is essentially the 7 strategy).

\- Hardware moved forward. Vista and 7 don't run well on 1 GB of RAM. By the
time 7 shipped most new PCs had 2 GB or more.

\- Drivers were fixed/improved. When 7 shipped it ran Vista compatible drivers
which were time tested by that stage.

Ultimately I just roll my eyes at people who continue to be critical of Vista.
At least 8/8.1 I understand their perspective (Start Screen, etc), but trying
to bash Vista while holding up 7 as this incredible release is just strange
given how similar the two are.

~~~
redxdev
Whatever your thoughts are on Vista, the changes pretty much had to happen.
The old driver model was just that: old. Something had to give, and
unfortunately a lot of companies weren't ready. Windows 7 cleaned up much of
the UI, fixed some performance issues, and was released at a time that drivers
and memory usage weren't as big of a deal. Does that make Win7 that much
better than Vista? Not really, but it does make Win7 a better release simply
due to timing.

I'd say that Apple could have had a similar issue with going from OS9 to OSX,
though they at least had a long period of some degree of backwards
compatibility. They, however, handled the transition much better since they
controlled all of the hardware and drivers.

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chrisseldo
The group pictures suggest they're also releasing an indie-folk album in a few
months.

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markbnj
Three photographs with six managers, and then the people sitting around the
big table in the photo at the end are "Microsoft workers." Not engineers,
designers, or writers, but "workers." I know Wired probably chose this
presentation, but I can't help dwelling on where the emphasis is.

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elorant
While I’m a Windows user buying a lot of MS’s developer tools, I fail to see
the need for changing Word every couple of years. I still have Office 2007
which covers 95% of my needs.

~~~
baldfat
Sorry but just for clarity, what 5% of your needs is in the new Office
compared to 2007? Only reason why I say that is I hear this 95% a lot.

When we looked to switching away from Office to something else people would
say 95% was covered by say Google Docs or another tool and people would go
hmmm and see that as a negative. I asked for the person to tell me what the 5%
we were missing and maybe we could fulfill that need with another tool. One
week later we made the switch since no one could find a single thing anyone
would be missing. One year later no one is missing anything and we were
covered for 100% of our work needs.

~~~
roel_v
Wait, are you saying you moved from Office to Google Docs and nobody could
find a thing there missed? So nobody ever used table of contents, styles,
paragraph formatting, a document that has mixed landscape/portrait pages,
cross-references or templates? How is that possible? What kind of profile are
those users, I mean, what sort of work do they do in Word? (I'm assuming we're
only talking about Word here and not Excel, because then it'd be even harder
to believe)

~~~
baldfat
100 Percent Yes. It was for one department that makes reports from visiting
peoples homes that are just written documents. We didn't go with Docs but it
would have worked fine.

I would say our company of 400 people have very little need for Word and they
don't know how to use Excel besides making budgets with no real complected
formulas.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "100 Percent Yes. It was for one department that makes reports from visiting
> peoples homes that are just written documents."

Did you explore using Mail Merge?

~~~
baldfat
Why would people need mail merge when making written reports? Heck I bet you
the money in my wallet that less than 1% of current users even know how to do
a mail merge let alone have a use for it. Sure in the 1980s and 90s doing mail
merges for people's Christmas letters felt like a killer app at the time
doesn't really get used much these days in Office.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Why would people need mail merge when making written reports?"

Depends on whether you want the data to be easily reusable or not. Is there no
need for any summarisation of the data on these reports? Is the layout of
these reports standardised in any way?

Mail merge isn't exactly an advanced feature, all you need is a basic Excel
spreadsheet containing the data you want to insert. Takes 10 minutes or less
to teach someone how to use it.

~~~
baldfat
You do know you can do mail merge in Google Docs?

I am certainly not trying to say mail merge is an advance feature. I am just
saying MOST people can not do a mail merge, THE VAST majority.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Cannot because they can understand it or cannot because they haven't been
shown it?

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smegel
> and a machine learning-based help feature called Tell Me

Uh oh.

~~~
willis77
"It looks like you're trying to write a _potato_. Would you like help?"

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stephendicato
I understand this is journalism, but the pictures give an ominous tone that,
regardless of how much I read, I can't overcome. No one is smiling or looks
remotely happy.

~~~
baldfat
Also I think of a bunch of things that clearly shows that Microsoft has
changed.

They released a programing tool in LINUX for one.

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zero-rated
Microsoft has changed in what way? It no longer spies on its users and reports
them to the CIA?

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andrea_sdl
While I personally prefer other system to develop personal project (I do that
on a mac), at work I use windows 10 and recently I have thought about switch
from Evernote to Onenote.

I wouldn't have imaging that in the past, mostly because the microsoft product
were so unpolished that were terrible to use (although sometimes very
advanced).

microsoft IS changing, and I think they are moving in the right direction. (I
don't agree in all of their choices, but I like the result).

~~~
ManFromUranus
> mostly because the microsoft product were so unpolished that were terrible
> to use

Unpolished compared to what? Open office? Apples offerings? Surely you are
joking. MS Office is probably the most polished and feature rich office suite
out there. For me nothing else compares, the only factor that was off-putting
about using office was the cost. The cost deterrent has largely gone away, so
for me there's almost no reason to use anything else, other than to
investigate future alternatives.

~~~
JimmaDaRustla
Ya, I don't know what he is talking about either...Office has always had
complete and fully functional features in every release - you never got a
product which didn't have features of it's predecessor (maybe aside
clipart/wordart or gimmicky stuff like that), nor partially implemented
features.

~~~
viraptor
Office 95/97 was a time when you had to open the file in the same version it
was saved in or the formatting and any embedded objects could change. This
happened both ways - not just a backwards compatibility issue.

