
Here Comes the Next Microsoft Office - supersiteforwin
http://winsupersite.com/office-2013/here-comes-next-office
======
UnoriginalGuy
Where is Visio?

Sometimes I think that Microsoft themselves want Visio to die off. They don't
give it to students (so they can learn it) and even a lot of business licences
don't come with it.

I understand they want to hold something back so they can sell their super
enterprise style licences, but Visio is such a versatile tool which has a wide
variety of applications far outside of big businesses (e.g. room arranging,
garden layouts, college classes, etc).

Worse still each year that Microsoft hold Visio back the web-based
alternatives get better and better. Eventually Microsoft will just be forced
to discontinue it and nobody will even notice, because almost nobody knows
what Visio is or does right now.

I would happily trade Access or OneNote for Visio. Why not let me do a "pick
your own licence" deal? I can pick four or five products I want (e.g. Word,
Excel, Outlook, Visio, and OneNote).

~~~
meaty
No one I know uses Visio any more. They all seem to use PowerPoint for
diagramming.

Why? Because you have to pay more for Visio and to be honest Visio is
horrible.

I use dia over Visio - it's a much stronger product.

------
ricardobeat
> Microsoft never did a particularly good job of making Office a
> representative Mac application suite

Most people who have used Office:Mac will attest that it has a _better_
interface than the original. Hopefully this cross-platform release won't be a
setback.

~~~
warfangle
Until you tried to load more than 100 rows into excel. Then you find out it
crashes every ten seconds.

Excel for mac is also _extremely_ slow and laggy.

------
nhebb
> the subscription-based versions of Office 2013—which are sold through Office
> 365

I wonder whether this will be a source of confusion among consumers. The way I
understood it, Office 2013 is the desktop version, and Office 365 is the
cloud-based subscription version. But I see both marketed under the Office
2013 moniker. Between this and the Windows 8 / Windows RT, their product names
are overlapping, giving these launches a muddled message.

~~~
mynameisvlad
I'm pretty sure they're trying to retire the 201X moniker from Office. Office
for RT, and the 2013 final copies on MSDN, all lack year marks on the loading
screen. It's just Word now, not Word 2013.

Basically, they're trying to brand Office 365 as the subscription, with Office
as the software suite, which can be part of the subscription.

Of course, the box art from October still has the year:
<http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/1_office2013.png>

But I think that the subscription-based model will mean that there won't be a
version you receive. You just always get the newest one, whatever it may be.

------
mtgx
Microsoft will have a problem in the future - not as big of a problem as the
Windows one, but still a pretty big problem. They will have to make some
choices.

1) Keep Office Windows (and Mac) only as some sort of "competitive advantage"

2) Expand Office to iOS and Android, too, which will have billions of users in
the future, more than the Windows ecosystem itself

3) Keep prices as high as ever

4) Dramatically lower prices by an order of magnitude to make sense for the
mobile ecosystems, and be more competitive with free or sub $10 Office Suites,
that while may not have all the Office features, it will have a lot for many
people. If they didn't think that was true, they would've never made the
Office 365 web app.

So the problem for Microsoft is that whichever way they go, they _will_ get
less revenue from Office in the future, whether that's because more people
will prefer cheaper alternatives like Google Docs or even their own Office
365, or because they have to dramatically lower the price for the "native"
versions on iOS and Android, or because most people on these platforms, won't
care as much about Microsoft's Office, because there are good enough (or
free/much cheaper) alternatives.

I think in the end they will get less revenue because of a combination of both
not being as relevant on competing platforms, and having to compete on a much
cheaper price level.

~~~
rednukleus
They will almost certainly make the iOS and Android apps only available to
monthly subscribers, which includes all their cloud services. If they have
"billions" of customers paying them $10-$20 a month, they will be doing very
well for themselves.

~~~
ams6110
Is there really a market for serious office productivity apps on tablets? I'm
not seeing it. I certainly would not want to do any heavy duty editing or
spreadsheet work on a 7" touch screen.

------
wasd
> Microsoft will also update the Mac suite at some point, meaning that by the
> end of 2013, there will be a version of Microsoft Office available for every
> major computing platform on earth. Just as with Multiplan in 1982.

Could someone elaborate what the sort of work it would take for MS support
Linux? I'm really excited that there is going to be web version because I'm
sick of LibreOffice.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
But which Linux? Linux is relatively small in general, but then when you start
looking at the fragmentation within Linux it gets even nastier.

For example, Mint Linux, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc? Valve has only decided to
release Steam on Ubuntu and support that.

~~~
viraptor
Yes, they packaged it for Ubuntu and it's been repackaged and worked in
majority of distributions in a matter of minutes. Literally - around 30min
after the announcement I wanted to start looking at a way to get it running
under Arch, but there was already a 6th version of the packaging script
available online.

I'm not sure what do you mean by fragmentation exactly - sure all
distributions look a bit different and have some specific approach to
packages/configuration, but apart from that it's all almost exactly the same.
If something works under ubuntu, there's no good reason it wouldn't work under
other distributions.

------
danmaz74
Would it be possible to run the Android version under Linux? I know that this
will sound like anathema to many, but it could be an interesting development,
considering that not being able to run Office is one of the main obstacles to
Linux desktop adoption.

~~~
mikegioia
It's doubtful without the source and/or running something like Ubuntu for
Android.

While I respect the work put in, OpenOffice/LibreOffice are just unusable.
I've tried since 2007 but I've had to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets
instead.

I would pay a lot of money for a Linux Excel.

~~~
ricardobeat
Have you tried LibreOffice recently? It had a major breakthrough some time ago
(a year? can't remember) that improved loading times enormously and actually
made it usable.

~~~
danmaz74
Personally I use LibreOffice and find it good in many use cases, but sometimes
you just need Office - either for compatibility reasons, or because you need
some special feature.

~~~
mtgx
But I think the real question is - do you think most people who need a Word or
Excel app for whatever reason will have this kind of problem?

~~~
danmaz74
Most people no - but, for example, a company of my group tried to go fully
Linux, but constantly have problems with Word documents formatting. Having
that option could help a lot this kind of choices.

------
wazoox
> _by the end of 2013, there will be a version of Microsoft Office available
> for every major computing platform on earth._

Except Linux, which is quite a major platform it seems.

~~~
negrit
Even if I really like Linux and I'm using it on a daily basis no it's not,
it's below 2%.

------
RandallBrown
This is a weird article to me. In my experience, people hated the ribbon and
didn't find it useful or innovative, just annoying. Also, most of my friends
that switch to Mac found the Mac version of office to be quite a bit better
than the Windows version. I know Word for Mac had quite a few more features
(Notebooks being the biggest one) than the windows version.

I suppose they could be talking about lack of apps, like OneNote and Visio?

~~~
untog
I agree with you on the Mac comments, but Paul Thurrott himself talks about
the ribbon in the comments- it annoys experts, but everyday users love it.
Since we are surrounded by very tech savvy people, we tend to think that
everyone hates it. They don't.

~~~
princeb
to some extent i can't really buy this argument. office 2007 still accepts
office 2003 keyboard shortcuts, so if an expert is completely at home with 03
he or she should still be able to function normally in 2007+ without needing
to visit the ribbon very much. i was quite happy with this - the ribbon is
there, but it forces nothing on me. i was happily smashing away until i one
day decided to pay attention and saw the yellow dialog box over the ribbon
which said something like 'office 2003 shortcut'.

if an lotus 1-2-3 superuser for some reason really couldn't change his spots
after 30 years, excel 2010 still keeps / as a menu shortcut for those folks,
even though lotus shortcuts no longer work.

------
mustefaj
Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Calendar.

------
xradionut
The cynical side of me that has used Microsoft software for 3 decades asks:
'WTF did Redmond break to make it "better"?'

