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Microsoft launches Office for iPad

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Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#211

Post by ghshephard »

kyllo wrote: post #130
jamesbritt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Office always been available for the Mac?

In a limited way. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Communicator (i/o Lync) are available for Mac, but they are not even close to the Windows versions in terms of feature parity. VBA support has been on-and-off. Access, Infopath, and Publisher are not available at all. They're written in Cocoa and on a different release cycle. There is no Office for Mac 2013, current version is 2011.

For 95%+ of their user base, Word, Powerpoint and Excel have feature parity on the Mac/Windows. Outlook and Lync are significantly superior on the Windows Platform.

Excel had a pretty nasty regression on the Macintosh in Office 2004/2008 (to the point at which I no longer used it on the Mac in 2008, it was pretty horrid) - but they returned it to (mostly) feature parity as of Office 2011.

Sharepoint, on the other hand, is complete crap on a Macintosh. It's almost like it's been designed to be bad.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#212

Post by BugBrother »

jusben1369 wrote: post #205
BugBrother wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 spec…

You really quote a marketing spin presentation as truth?! From Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs?!

Again, this is an old subject. Google "video for windows" "source code" apple quicktime

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows#Overview

"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#213

Post by wtetzner »

skrowl wrote: post #77
gum_ina_package wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an incredibly interesting development. I personally love c# and would be thrilled if it became a mainstream language outside the enterprise software crowd.

It's not so much that I love C# as I hate Objective C (iOS) and Java (Android)

To be fair, there are many language choices that compile to Java bytecode. They can be used for Android development.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#214

Post by malandrew »

batoure wrote: post #189
malandrew wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though…

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up. And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

What does she use VMware for?

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#215

Post by barista »

WalterBright wrote: post #191
octo_t wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still dominates overwhelmingly in enterprise, but at homes? People might have a windows box, but lots of older adults (people over 40) just use an iPad in front of the TV instead. My mum hasn't touched her PC in several months.

I can't use an ipad for real work. I can't program on anything smaller than a BFM and I need a real keyboard to do more than a few characters.

That's why this release is pretty awesome that it allows you to read documents for free. It's only editing that you need to pay for looks like.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#216

Post by chj »

slantyyz wrote: post #68
amaks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.

Is a starting price of $7/mo that egregious? That's around what I pay for my minimal Github account. If you really use Office every day during the workday, it's worth the money. The $15/m that my company pays per user for our 365 account is well worth the money.

The problem is there are people who don't use as much as $7/mo. Of course, if your company covers it, it is not a big deal.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#217

Post by dep_b »

Maarten88 wrote: post #92
skrowl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that the RT versions of Microsoft Surface (and other RT tables) come with Office and have since they launched, right? https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-2...

But what is still missing is a Metro version of Office. Historically, Office has always been the showcase on how to build proper Windows applications, it's where UI innovations are first introduced: i.e. embedding, multiple document interface, icon bar, ribbon. Since the introduction of the Metro ('modern') UI, Microsoft has not been able to really show the power and possibilities of it. Office for Metro should fix t…

I read that the Office branch of Microsoft allows exactly zero libraries and lines of code that they do not control. They use their own C-compiler, everything. That also means that they first need to copy Metro before they are prepared to use it. I can imagine that is quite a big task.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#218

Post by ekianjo »

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…

That will be interesting to see if they actually release Office on Linux distros should the Linux desktop become more popular (and that's kind of expected).

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#219

Post by ekianjo »

gress wrote: post #195
batoure wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market market -> all the people encompasses your share share -> using your stuff Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.

It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.

How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#220

Post by bobbles »

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…

The current office 365 solution for me works out to be about $2 AUD a month per device.

Considering no 'upfront' cost that isn't really too bad for me, and I have no problems paying for tools I actually use to get work done.

If people want to edit Office documents using non-Office software there are plenty of free alternatives.

The fact that Microsoft is the only company able to do this without formatting errors is value that I think is worth the fee.

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