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Microsoft launches Office for iPad

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Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#111

Post by pionar »

smacktoward wrote: post #97
ihuman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a software company, and Office is one of their biggest products. Why would they make it free? While they do give out OneNote for free, it is not a major part of Office. Making Word, excel, and PowerPoint free would hurt them much more than it would help them.

The same reason a friendly drug dealer would offer a first hit free: to get you hooked. Once you have a bunch of important documents locked up in Office file formats -- which Office is the only app guaranteed to be able to read reliably -- you have a great incentive down the road to start sending money to Microsoft so you can continue to access them.

I believe that's what they're doing, with the "free to view, pay to edit" model.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#113

Post by Pxtl »

They missed the competition for IE completely and were way too late with IE7. They missed the competition from the mobile world and dragged their feet a bit with WP7. They're not going to lose Office too, which is their biggest cash-cow. Without Office, entire corporations will no longer see Microsoft as a "must-have" company.

So yeah, iPad.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#114

Post by Pxtl »

kyllo wrote: post #104
martinald wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The most exciting thing would be Mono becoming a first-class citizen for .NET. I think this is likely for two reasons: 1) They may well acquire Xamarin, which would result in them 'owning' Mono. 2) The new CEO has been extremely forward thinking vs the rest of Microsoft on supporting open source software on Azure. 3) Increasing amounts of ASP.NET and other .NET technologies are open source now I would love f…

Yes, this would be amazing. C# and F# are great programming languages, and it would earn a lot of developer goodwill if Microsoft decided to officially support the effort to break these languages out of the Windows ghetto.

C# and F# are great languages, but there are a lot of utterly terrible things in the .NET framework that need to be maintained... I don't envy Miguel in supporting all Microsoft's various false-start libraries.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#115

Post by pionar »

nobodyshere wrote: post #24
cobalt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)

But if I'm alone using it, that's not 5 users. That will be $100/yr for 1 user. And that appears to be expensive in general. A cracked version will come with editing capabilities, make no mistake. I'd gladly once pay a fair amount of money for a version with edit and without subscription.

It probably does not save on the device, besides in some sort of caching mechanism.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#116

Post by pionar »

bdcravens wrote: post #34
k-mcgrady wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What does this have to do with Gates? Under Gates leadership MS has been developing software for Apple since the 90's. Edit: Fixed possible factual error.

If you listen to recent interviews, he still holds to the view that Microsoft has always been the true innovator with regard to tablets, and that's where serious business computing takes place.

Yes, Microsoft put out the first tablet computers (with Toshiba's help, I believe) in the early 2000s. The problem was that they got it very wrong.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#117

Post by tkubacki »

pionar wrote: post #110
yulaow wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really happy seeing that azure sdks are released not only natively for windows but also for osx and linux. Imho, their strategy for asp.net can be easily what you described here.

asp.net is open source, and it should run on any CLR.

I've got working asp.net ecommerce solutions, but for my last project went back to Java/Dropwizard/IntelliJ - it is just way better dev exp. + perf is much better on Linux. MS will be not interested in supporting competing (Windows Server/MS SQL vs Linux / PostgreSQL) server platform - it's sad but true.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#118

Post by [deleted] »

Livven wrote: post #106
chrisdevereux wrote: post #12

The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit. Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that. If it was…

Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221 If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link t…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#119

Post by zyadsherif »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #10
zyadsherif wrote: post #2

Finally they've accepted the fact that they need to optimize to apple products, the Gates mentality has been blocking innovation in this area and this might be the breakthrough !

Huh? What does this have to do with Gates? Under Gates leadership MS has been developing software for Apple since the 90's. Edit: Fixed possible factual error.

While you are right, you might want to check this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GxLS7PqEbM

Gates has attacked the iPad on every interview claiming that it's useless.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#120

Post by lttlrck »

RyanZAG wrote: post #79
cobalt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)

It's expensive because it has competition that is charging less. The actual price doesn't matter that much given consumers are free to choose alternatives. That said, $100/yr is extremely expensive in most countries in the world.

Things are "expensive" because they cost a lot of money, not that because there are cheaper alternatives.
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