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Microsoft launches Office for iPad

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Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#201

Post by niels_olson »

pionar wrote: post #111
smacktoward wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

maybe it should be free to edit, pay to share?

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#203

Post by dave84 »

dsaravel wrote: post #197

$119 (in Australia, at least) is too much for me to try editing capabilities. How about you keep the price but only prevent me from saving? I need to know how it feels editing the documents before I commit to such price.

The Office 365 website offers a free months trial.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#204

Post by batoure »

niels_olson wrote: post #199
batoure wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners. So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep…

Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?

I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.

When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#205

Post by jusben1369 »

BugBrother wrote: post #200
jusben1369 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has. And it was pretty good. Ironically at the time it was made available it was part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back (See we are supporting another platform! wink wink ) My how times have changed.

>> part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime. I googled this: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...

"At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple." - People forget back then that if MSFT dropped Office support for Apple it would have been a significant blow.

- Then Steve Jobs himself. I think these specifics support my initial comment.

"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again."

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#206

Post by georgemcbay »

sytelus wrote: post #151
jmspring wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trend towards the "subscription model". We've seen it with Adobe's suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.

The trend toward subscription model is generally misguided. When you buy software, you are pre-paying the whole amount upfront. Plus your chance of defecting to competitor in near future (aka subscriptio "churn") is almost zero. Plus when you get new product with new features out, customer has a good justification to repeat the whole cycle again. Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has…

I think you are vastly underestimating how much effort would be required to create software with similar feature sets to what Adobe's has.

I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#207

Post by herokusaki »

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…

That office suite looks nice, much like most of Microsoft's web presence. I'm tempted to use it.

I can't help but wonder, however, how would you expect Office Online to compare to Google Docs in terms of privacy (including in the long run)?

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#208

Post by r00fus »

jamesbritt wrote: post #109
kyllo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it's a good strategy for Microsoft to make its software run on other platforms. This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's not even the early 2000's with the "I'm a Mac vs. I'm a PC" meme. Now there are multiple popular platforms (at least in the consumer market), none with clear dominance, and meanwhile Microsoft's software only works on their own platform. They have to co…

Hasn't Office always been available for the Mac?

Yes, in fact, before Windows even existed, the 1.0 version of Word for Mac was released the same year the Mac debuted (1984).

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#209

Post by zenbowman »

mikestew wrote: post #8

I wonder if they aren't a little late on this. I assume that I'm not the only one that found out I can get along just fine without Office on an iPad (or in my own personal case, get along just fine without Office at all). If the free Pages/Keynote/Numbers doesn't do it, I probably need a "real" computer anyway. That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices a…

If you can get along without Office, then you are not their target customer. The marketing and sales folk at my company are so dependent on (and skilled with) Excel that it would surprise most techies to see what they can do with what we consider very primitive tools.

This is a good move, and Microsoft has always been better as the underdog, they've just been away from that role for a long time.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#210

Post by r00fus »

adventured wrote: post #146
sz4kerto wrote: post #4

MS is changing, and make no mistake, this has started with Ballmer. If you watch(ed) the press conf, it's quite apparent. App store for Android, Office for iPad, AD for Azure.. quite nice stuff, that's what we expect from a software giant: just release stuff for everything, everywhere, and make things be able to work with each other nicely. Good to see that, competition is always good for the users, and Apple, Google…

I know it's not a huge deal, but I was always impressed they offered Linux for Azure.

I think Microsoft has realized that Linux isn't the danger they feared.
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