Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft launches Office for iPad

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 284 posts

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#261

Post by dasil003 »

batoure wrote: post #175
dasil003 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher…

There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish) http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/270629…

That's mostly all good and fair. I don't have any data to contribute. But the I think my fundamental point is good:

PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.

You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#262

Post by romanovcode »

arrc wrote: post #259

They've also started using open-source technologies like Node.js and javascript (must be typescript). Microsoft is finally adopting open source with open arms. source: http://inessential.com/2014/02/04/azure_takes_over

Also released MVC/WebApi/EntityFramework to public was pretty big deal.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#263

Post by silverlake »

yaeger wrote: post #257
mediaman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the anti-corporate parade of users on HN who aren't used to paying for software. The majority of users here are wholly outside the target market. There's a huge universe of companies more than willing to pay for these, and it's about time that MS take advantage of re-establishing Office as a cross-device dominant platform for the everyday office worker, rather than losing its edge as an office platform beca…

>It's just the anti-corporate parade of users on HN who aren't used to paying for software. Close. We aren't used to keep paying for software with no end in sight. Don't know about you but I subscribe to things I know I will be using regularly. Like daily. Guess were office software falls? Not under the daily usage at home. Am I supposed to start writing word docs each week and mail them to my family just so I don't…

> Guess were office software falls? Not under the daily usage at home.

So don't buy it. I don't own Photoshop, but I don't go to Adobe threads and decry that they charge money for their products.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#266

Post by batoure »

voltagex_ wrote: post #258
batoure wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

she has been an avid user of PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39) since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.

I could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to.

edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#267

Post by batoure »

voltagex_ wrote: post #260
batoure wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

she has been an avid user of PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39) since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure: * Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried) * Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows * installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM * shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows * ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes * printed from DOS…

I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#268

Post by MadManE »

vparikh wrote: post #71
MadManE wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscriptions in general leave a bad taste in my mouth. What happened to just buying the software, and when you felt like upgrading (either because of compatibility issues, or needed functionality) then you can upgrade? Subscriptions definitely are a win for a business by ensuring income streams, but as a consumer I want to pay the company when I feel like buying something and not when they feel like they need money.

In my opinion, subscriptions are a net win for everyone. For the following reasons: 1. They allow easy access to upgrades, and make it far easier to make sure everyone is on the latest and greatest (you aren't paying for every upgrade, so there is little incentive to hold out.) 2. The consumer pays far less up front -- for example, Adobe Creative Suite costs $600+ and that is money you have to pay upfront. Or I can p…

How is it a win/win if I lose my data when I quit paying the subscription? Having proprietary data formats means that if I want to keep using what I've created, I'm kept hostage by my subscription.

It's a lot better with things like Office, where other programs have been able to extract the data, but it still seems too much like extortion for my liking.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#270

Post by kyllo »

nikanj wrote: post #243
kyllo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you can feel free to never use or support the false starts. In open source they are allowed to die. In a closed ecosystem they have a tendency to live on as deprecated zombies.

Which is really good, because at Microsoft's size, there's often a non-trivial number of companies who drank the kool-aid and invest hundreds of man-years to building a system using those false starts.

Not even just companies, but also governments and entire countries.

Since the late 1990s, South Korea has had a law that any website transmitting any sort of banking/financial data was required to use a specific ActiveX plugin for encryption. This law was in place for years after ActiveX was officially deprecated, and I believe that it has only just recently been amended to allow other crypto implementations.

Post reply on HN