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Microsoft Changes Tack, Making Office Suite Free on Mobile
- modifier 12y ago"Come in to my parlour" said the spider[1] to the fly[2]. [1] NSA partner [2] You
- Cuuugi 12y agoIf you think your data is safe on either device, with or without Office, then you are deluded.
- spacefight 12y agoOh I think it's pretty safe on a non-wired/wireless enabled computer in a room with thick concrete walls filled with lead. ;)
- modifier 12y agoAlright then. Lets give up. Lets offer up our private lives to the prying eyes and ears of the NSA.
- atwebb 12y ago>third of Microsoft’s revenue during its last fiscal year — about $26 billion of $87 billion in total. Wow, I know it was high, I never realized it was that high, I'm guessing that includes Exchange and administration app costs.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- spydum 12y agoconsidering office is installed on something like 1 BILLION machines.. it's not that surprising. The software is rather expensive per machine. Source: http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/ms_numbers.pdf http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/ms_numbers.pdf
- jobu 12y agoGoogle Docs have always been free, three weeks ago Apple's iWork suite went free, and now Office for mobile is free. Competition is a wonderful thing - hopefully it starts to bring down the price of Microsoft's cash cow, Office.
- izacus 12y agoI'm just worried that we're going to start paying for those suites with our confidental document data instead of money... with no alternative choice.
- icehawk219 12y agoThat's how people pay for Google Docs and all of Google's products and they seem to be perfectly OK with it. As long as the perceived price is $0 they're happy and don't really care what the real price is for things. Ignorance truly is bliss.
- izacus 12y agoI don't mind other people using that, but I'd rather have at least a single mobile/desktop office suite available that does not send everything to US -_-
- pwnna 12y agoLibreOffice comes in mind for that one.
- sp332 12y agoBut not everyone uses Google Docs, and not every user trusts it with important or confidential data.
- zacharycohn 12y agoA lot of people/companies/governments are not okay with it, and do not use it.
- cowabunga 12y agoThe majority of the power of Office is only available on the desktop: COM, automation and integration. This isn't a total give away, this is a loss leader which is just selling an editing front end for the files, not anything like the power of the full product. However, I really think that Office on the desktop is a turd but it does make automation pretty easy but slightly awkward and painful. Perhaps this is bitterness from converting VSTO and Word interop to late binding all morning but I'm not a fan. This is "meh" even to someone as embedded into the ecosystem like myself.
- gabriel34 12y agoI believe most of Office's userbase doesn't use anything more complicated than excel's formulas and word's styles (perhaps some academyc writers use latex or fields)
- cowabunga 12y agoIn my sector (finance), literally everyone has some automation junk set up somewhere. They're usually written by one person and mailed around or stuck on fileservers somewhere or copied off a website somewhere badly. It's surprisingly common. Even my wife who is a complete luddite has a couple of scripts for excel she copied off a web site to do a tax calculation.
- nnnnni 12y agoI "love" when those things break and the original author left the company a decade ago... ugh.
- Ntrails 12y ago...and then you get handed it to fix and find zero comments, undeclared variables (often single letters), and then 70 lines of "sheet scrolling" followed by the same loop 3 times in some internal function evidencing that half of it was done by macro record. Not bitter at all. Nope.
- NicoJuicy 12y agoI think this is a huge and fundamental change for Microsoft... Satya Nadella (Microsoft's CEO) understands that you don't choose your endusers platform. If you don't go with them, you'll loose them on the long run.
- Apreche 12y agoI can't find it in the app store. Is it not actually out yet?
- gtk40 12y agoIt's on the Play Store at least.
- bitL 12y agoNot released for tablets on Play Store. Only smartphones...
- Casseres 12y agoYou can sign up (nominate yourself?) for the Office for Android Tablet Preview here: http://www.instant.ly/s/w7taW/nav http://www.instant.ly/s/w7taW/nav (Found by clicking through several links of the article and removing the SessionID in their link.)
- yantramanav 12y agoDoes anyone know if how good is the integration with the underlying OS? MS Office on desktop won't work on mobile devices without re-thinking the interface and UX.
- dummyfellow 12y agoOffice for iPad is very well designed, now they need to upgrade it on Windows Phone
- ladzoppelin 12y ago“We’d like to dramatically increase the number of people trying Office,” Smart, considering its the better product and you still have the option to download an actual program.
- amitparikh 12y agoDoes this have any implications for the forthcoming update to Office for Mac?
- ape4 12y agoI still prefer LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/ http://www.libreoffice.org/
- k-mcgrady 12y agoLibreOffice runs on mobile devices?
- edent 12y agoThere is an Android port. It is... Interesting. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenoffice https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenof...
- mahouse 12y agoWell, it's ugly, but I don't doubt it's useful if you're on a tablet.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago...wow. Looks like they just tried to copy the UI from desktop _exactly_. I guess it's pretty hard to get the manpower to develop mobile apps as well as the desktop version of such a large OS project.
- batiudrami 12y agoGood lord that looks rubbish, but also quite charming. I can't help but look at it and smile.
- ygra 12y agoAs far as I recall, that's the same Chrome does on Windows 8 with the Metro mode. It looks identical to the desktop version, down to tiny toolbar buttons you can't reliably hit with a finger, etc.
- davidgerard 12y agoAndrOpenOffice is a port of of Apache OpenOffice, not LibreOffice. It's ... a bit of a dancing bear.
- gentlebend 12y agoGreat, I'll be busy prepping an Android VM appliance for this that I can install on every machine I touch. Probably a good idea to isolate Office code from the real OS anyway. Hope I can get printing to work.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- xxs 12y agoGiven there is Android for x86 (atom), it should not be that hard indeed.
- m_mueller 12y agoI wonder why you're being downvoted for a hackish idea on a site called 'Hacker News' eyes rolling. I think the idea is interesting - not sure how to make file sharing work though, can you mount SSH drives from the local network on Android? Or do you want to just use Dropbox for that?
- jdorfman 12y agoSmart move by Nadella and Co. I'm a sure they will see an increase in office 365 subscriptions in the near future to make up the ROI.
- localhost 12y agoOne of the things that is missing from the comments here that say "Office Substitute X does 99% of what users need" is that in most companies, there is already a way of doing a task. In many complex tasks, Excel is a front end to a complex business process. That business process is kicked off by some VBA code that talks to some COM object that talks to the back-end infrastructure. For example, in Finance, there are scenarios where that COM object kicks off a job on a Linux HPC cluster to compute, for example, the risk of a position that a trader is interested in. While "Office Substitute X" could potentially do the same thing, the trader has absolutely zero interest in using anything other than Excel, and he/she is the rainmaker. So there is very little cannibalization of the existing desktop Office business for Enterprise customers. What this seems to be doing is taking people's familiarity with Office at work, and making it cheaper/easier for them to continue to experience Office in their personal lives.
- sheetjs 12y agoI think you misunderstand the point of most of those comments. Numbers and Google Sheets for iPad have been available for months, so Microsoft's offering has to demonstrate value above and beyond those. Unfortunately, the 2014 offering doesn't really do that. Having encountered an issue before (The workbook you are trying to open is an ISO Strict file), it's not clear if Microsoft actually leveraged the existing Office code in the mobile versions: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2960660 https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2960660
- m_mueller 12y agomonths? Don't you mean years? At least Numbers has been available since the very first iPad AFAIK - one of the things that Apple clearly did better with their iPad introduction compared to MS's Surface introduction with no touch optimized Office.
- randomfool 12y agoWhat would it take to see free Office for desktop without COM integration?
- jangid 12y agoThis will have different impact in different economies of the world. And eventually the bigger demographies will give MS a chance to make some space. Let us see what sticky features MS brings. So that in the longer run a user gets caught in smooth integration of Mobile and Notebook version of Office. But there are fewer hopes now. Too late.
- johnloeber 12y agoHuh, interesting. What I like most about this is that Microsoft has been putting out a major piece of news (Microsoft Band, Independence Day, now this, etc.) every few days. I feel as if we're now beginning to really see product-level changes as a consequence of Satya being CEO. I'm very excited by these developments.
- WWKong 12y agoProduct cycles are much much longer. So, no.
- JeffreyKaine 12y agoEx MSFT employee here. Product cycles may or may not be longer, but red tape was the biggest issue when Ballmer was running the ship. There have always been many awesome teams working on cool stuff at MSFT, they were just never allowed to launch anything.
- chj 12y agoif MS charge a high price, biggest winner is apple.
- stealthlogic 12y agoIt's a trap.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wooyi 12y agoCurrent generation of kids are using Google Docs in school right now. Can Office survive another generation?
- anilshanbhag 12y agoBefore Microsoft used to be this tightly integrated system. You had Office only on Windows, all mobile apps come on Windows Phone first. Satya has changed the company quite a lot . Each division works as an independent unit, they compete. Another example of this was the dropbox integration into office. Clearly one of the reasons to use Skydrive was the easy integration into Office. With the new integration, Skydrive will have to compete on features instead of getting fed because of its integration with office. Waiting for the day when IE becomes cross-platform.
- sheetjs 12y ago> You had Office only on Windows Mac versions of Office have been available for decades. In fact, the first version of Office was actually released for the Macintosh and not for Windows
- jadavis 12y agoIt's funny that Microsoft is advertising the Surface as a sort of iPad++, while at the same time making full Office free for the iPad, but not for the Surface. (I know, Surface Pro is a full Windows PC and the iPad isn't, and Windows Office has more features than iPad Office... Just saying the marketing is kinda inconsistent with the sales approach.)
- Elepsis 12y agoPretty much every ad aired this year for the Surface Pro 3 compares it directly to a MacBook Air, not to an iPad. (Literally--the MacBook is on camera alongside the Surface Pro in many of these ads.) To the extent that you perceive the Surface advertised as iPad++, you're probably thinking more of the original Surface ads one to two years ago (which focused on the regular Surface, which did in fact ship with a free copy of Office).
- annamarie 12y agoA lot of big announcements at once from MS. Free Office, new Band, and did you see they're opening the Azure ML for free testing? http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2014/11/05/microsoft-announces-major-update-to-azure-sql-database-adds-free-tier-to-azure-machine-learning.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2014/...
- dcw303 12y agoWith such low market share, they had to do something. Giving it away is not the answer. They're thinking that a loss leader will increase sales on their regular Office licenses, but that remains to be seen. All I see is further validation to the market that mobile apps should be free. This is bad news for independent developers and established software houses alike.
- hnriot 12y agoat first I thought, cool, but then realized that I'd miss google docs too much if I went back to Office. Aside from Excel which I don't use (prefer Pandas), I'd miss the collaborative document sharing and interoperability between laptop (Mac) and desktop (Linux.) Maybe Office does the document sharing/collaborative editing thing now. It's been a long time since I've used a MSFT product. although I will buy the Band, that looks awesome and the price point makes it irresistible to early adopters.
- jongalloway2 12y agoOffice and Office.com / OneDrive have had collaborative document editing for a while. Not sure about the mobile apps.
- mathattack 12y agoIs this a sign of what happens when a cloud guy becomes CEO?