Microsoft Brings Office To Everyone, Everywhere

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On Thursday, Microsoft Corp. took the next step to bring the productivity of Office to everyone with new Office apps and experiences for the iPhone and iPad, a preview of Office apps for Android tablets, and the ability for customers using these devices to create and edit Office content without a subscription. “Anytime someone has an idea or an inspiration, we want to empower them to take action,” said John Case, corporate vice president, Office, Microsoft. “With over a billion Office customers worldwide, and over 40 million downloads on the iPad, it’s clear that Office applications are what people want to use to get things done.” Starting today, iPhone and Android tablet customers can tap into the same experience that people with Office for iPad have enjoyed. Now, nearly everyone will be able to get more done, more quickly.
 
I just recently left MSN Explorer E-Mail, when King Microshit tried to force me to give them a Credit Card, as opposed paying them on my phone bill, as I had none for about the last 20 years.

I do, however, have a lot of old MSN e-mails stored away which I still need to acess fom time to time, so I tried to use the MSM explorer software, in off-line mode, to do that, but was given ant error message, saying the older SOFTWARE no longer functioned, and new software MUST BE DOWNLOADED FROM MSN, WHICH I NOW CAN'T DO, WITHOUT ENTERING IN TO A "NEW AGREEMENT" WITH MSN?

THEN I TRIED TO USE MY MSN OFFICE 2010s OUTLOOK TO DO THE SAME THING, AND GOT AN ERROR MESSAGE, TELLING ME MY "BOUGHT AND PAID FOR" MSN OFFICE SUITE, WAS NOW OPERATING WITH "LIMITED FUNCTIONALITY", AND THAT I SHOULD "BUY A CURRENT VERSION OF MSN OFFICE SUITE, WHICH OF COURSE, NOT ONLY WILL COST ME MORE $$$$, BUT WILL FORCE ME USE KING MICROSHIT'S "CLOUD" TO STORE THE RESULTS OF WHATEVER I DO, WHICH I DON'T NEED, OR WANT EITHER!

FORTUNATELY, I THINK, I CAN STILL USE "WORD READER", OR OLDER VERSIONS OF MSN WORD EDITOR TO DO THIS TOO?
 
Carpet bombing of anti-competitive filings against MS on this starting in 3 , 2 ,1 ...
I bet the EU must be frothing at the mouth over this announcement , kakakakakaka.
 
Carpet bombing of anti-competitive filings against MS on this starting in 3 , 2 ,1 ...
I bet the EU must be frothing at the mouth over this announcement , kakakakakaka.

I imagine that this had to cross Microsoft's mind but this is much harder anti-trust issue to make for no other reason that Microsoft's weak position in the mobile client space. Of course I guess this could be looked as the Office productivity space but then it just starts to get much more complicated than when the computing world was only desktop PCs.

But yeah, what Microsoft is doing with this and Office 365 and unlimited cloud storage on top of the bundling their currently doing with cheap PCs with one year Office 365 Personal subscriptions. It makes it a lot tougher for Google Docs and even free desktop client apps like LibreOffice.
 
The next question is that if you can get free editing of documents on the competition's devices, why are we paying for in on Windows devices?
 
The next question is that if you can get free editing of documents on the competition's devices, why are we paying for in on Windows devices?

My guess is that they're still not as good as the desktop clients, or the online office subscription.

I did a transcription job for my buddy earlier this year, and he wanted to use the free online office word application to do it. Turns out their spellcheck is practically non-existent. Tried google docs as well, also pretty damn shitty. Swapped over to Word 2010 on the desktop and suddenly the spellcheck and autocorrect were like MAGIC!
 
The next question is that if you can get free editing of documents on the competition's devices, why are we paying for in on Windows devices?

The desktop versions of Office are quite a bit more powerful, the same is true of the Mac. You can get free editing with the web client. The situation for Windows will be interesting in that there will be two native clients, one desktop and one touch first but that will work with a mouse, unlike the iOS version. The full desktop versions will still probably have some cost still as they are more powerful but the modern version will be all that many Windows users need.
 
Carpet bombing of anti-competitive filings against MS on this starting in 3 , 2 ,1 ...
I bet the EU must be frothing at the mouth over this announcement , kakakakakaka.

Anti-competative would have been Microsoft allowing Office on Surface RT run outside the RT sandbox, but forcing other developers in it. But since Surface RT was a flop, it was a non-issue.
 
Will the make a Linux desktop version of it? :D

Probably not. iOS and Android are necessary due to their significant market share in the mobile space and Microsoft's woeful position there. In the desktop space with Windows and OS X covered, Linux would be for bragging rights perhaps? But in any case desktop Linux is so much about not using commercial and proprietary that it wouldn't be worth the effort. A totally free, fully functional Linux Office client would just be seen as Microsoft trying to kill open source alternatives.
 
Probably not. iOS and Android are necessary due to their significant market share in the mobile space and Microsoft's woeful position there. In the desktop space with Windows and OS X covered, Linux would be for bragging rights perhaps? But in any case desktop Linux is so much about not using commercial and proprietary that it wouldn't be worth the effort. A totally free, fully functional Linux Office client would just be seen as Microsoft trying to kill open source alternatives.

Well, they are not stupid. IF they produced a Linux version of their office suite they would be cutting their own throat.

That is the single app that ties the Microsoft OS to business desktops.
 
That is the single app that ties the Microsoft OS to business desktops.

Certainly its a big one but FAR from only thing, you have tons of business apps that in many places would be a bigger issue than Office. If moving businesses to Windows 8 is a non-starter due to training issues there's no way that a Linux distro wouldn't be worse.
 
Certainly its a big one but FAR from only thing, you have tons of business apps that in many places would be a bigger issue than Office. If moving businesses to Windows 8 is a non-starter due to training issues there's no way that a Linux distro wouldn't be worse.

My wife works for bank and she came home and asked what I knew about some software called Liberal Office. After a chuckle, I said "You mean LibreOffice"
Seems that the entire company migrated off their MS Office suite to LibreOffice. A week or so afterwards I asked how it was going with LibreOffice, She said "It is a bit different but it works just as well. After everyone got use to it, no real problems."

Then recently I took a knife in the heart when my company announced our company wide service delivery package was migrating from NetSuite to a completely windows based software package that requires .NET framework to run. I did some trail runs with it under a VM and it runs like sh*t. Been running a linux workstation for the past 6 years with no problems. Now I have to deal with this crap.
 
She said "It is a bit different but it works just as well. After everyone got use to it, no real problems."

Do you really think that's how it would go with the majority of such migrations? I work at a mega bank and deal with a lot of folks that live in Excel, and we're not talking about home
budgets here. I'm not saying that something like Calc couldn't work but with all of the templates and add-ins and macros flying around I know it wouldn't be the smoothest transition. In any case, Office isn't nearly as expensive to use as some would think, especially with the aggressiveness that Microsoft is pricing and bundling things now.
 
Do you really think that's how it would go with the majority of such migrations? I work at a mega bank and deal with a lot of folks that live in Excel, and we're not talking about home
budgets here. I'm not saying that something like Calc couldn't work but with all of the templates and add-ins and macros flying around I know it wouldn't be the smoothest transition. In any case, Office isn't nearly as expensive to use as some would think, especially with the aggressiveness that Microsoft is pricing and bundling things now.

Have you messed around much with LibreOffice lately? I really like it, but I admit I'm not an Excel programmer like you so there's some stuff I'd never ask out of a spreadsheet that you probably do. Still, the current version is pretty good. Can you download it and try opening some of your big scary spreadsheets in it to see if they blow up? I'm really curious how close Calc is to handling some of the more obscure weirdo stuff people do with a spreadsheet.
 
Do you really think that's how it would go with the majority of such migrations? I work at a mega bank and deal with a lot of folks that live in Excel, and we're not talking about home
budgets here. I'm not saying that something like Calc couldn't work but with all of the templates and add-ins and macros flying around I know it wouldn't be the smoothest transition. In any case, Office isn't nearly as expensive to use as some would think, especially with the aggressiveness that Microsoft is pricing and bundling things now.

I don't now any specifics about the migration. Just my wife's report that the people she work with was find once they got use to it. So an anecdotal account for sure.
 
Have you messed around much with LibreOffice lately? I really like it, but I admit I'm not an Excel programmer like you so there's some stuff I'd never ask out of a spreadsheet that you probably do. Still, the current version is pretty good. Can you download it and try opening some of your big scary spreadsheets in it to see if they blow up? I'm really curious how close Calc is to handling some of the more obscure weirdo stuff people do with a spreadsheet.

I use LibreOffice on Linux and I'm sent excel docs all the time they work fine as long as the spreadsheet isn't loaded with weird graphics, like crap grabbed off of web pages. Then things can get a bit unpredictable. But as long it is a "straight" spreadsheet, it is fine.
 
The next question is that if you can get free editing of documents on the competition's devices, why are we paying for in on Windows devices?

I got Mobile Office on my Windows Phone as a free feature. It isn't very good, you can't do anything major. In Word you can type up some stuff and do very basic formatting, excel won't / can't let you use macros.

It is fine for something very basic, but you still need a real copy on a desktop to do any real work.
 
QUOTE=Megalith;1041215889]LibreOffice is probably as horrible as their website.

http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/writer/

Expanding a div to show a four-line paragraph? Wut.[/QUOTE]

Maybe it is horrible, but you'll never know until you try it. :p Obviously, you haven't.

I use LibreOffice on Linux and I'm sent excel docs all the time they work fine as long as the spreadsheet isn't loaded with weird graphics, like crap grabbed off of web pages. Then things can get a bit unpredictable. But as long it is a "straight" spreadsheet, it is fine.

I haven't had any problems either, but people ask Excel to do some crazy stuff too (stuff that should be done in Access or SQL or something, but a general lack of institutional knowledge usually totally holds back a firm from data manipulation in framework that can handle it...I think heatlesssun's bank is like that where they just don't know and can't figure out a database). There was a place I worked for that had multiple hundreds of megabytes of Excel in a single file and a single worksheet doing some crazy-face calculations that would fill up all 4 GB of a computer's RAM and then overrun the virtual memory (which was set to like manage itself and I think for Vista 32-bit which was what we were using, would cap the total system at like 7 GB including swap). I'm guessing that the kinda junk that heatless is dealing with and I'm kinda curious if Calc is up to workloads like that or if it'll just lose its mind and say, "Nope!"
 
I think heatlesssun's bank is like that where they just don't know and can't figure out a database.

That's hilarious. There just aren't that many entities on the plant that deal with databases in terms opt size, variety, complexity and value that we do.
 
That's hilarious. There just aren't that many entities on the plant that deal with databases in terms opt size, variety, complexity and value that we do.

Sorry, I didn't know. I just usually see Excel being asked to do stuff that doesn't belong in Excel at all and should be in at least Access when people start talking about needing some of the crazier stuff Excel does.

Anywho, can you try LibreOffice and see if Calc goes all crazy on your spreadsheets. Have you tried it in like version 4? I know version 3 gave me a little grumblings on both Windows and Linux, but 4 seems a lot better.
 
Sorry, I didn't know. I just usually see Excel being asked to do stuff that doesn't belong in Excel at all and should be in at least Access when people start talking about needing some of the crazier stuff Excel does.

It's interesting that you mention this. I'm currently working on a project to automate one of these crazy spreadsheets. One thing that we're very aware of these days are islands of data and all of these one-off spreadsheets and local database used in some very critical calculations involving billions of dollars of assists and there are lots of efforts to clean these kinds of things up.

Anywho, can you try LibreOffice and see if Calc goes all crazy on your spreadsheets. Have you tried it in like version 4? I know version 3 gave me a little grumblings on both Windows and Linux, but 4 seems a lot better.

I have tested OpenOffice and LibreOffice over the years on these kinds of things to see how viable they are. There's always that thing that just doesn't work or isn't quite right when dealing with anything that's complex. I'm not saying that LibreOffice isn't viable, but if you have millions of documents in Office like we do, forget it. You won't save a penny and spend many more fixing stuff.

If a company could save tons of money in licensing costs like we spend and simply switch over to free software with minimal impact we'd have done it long ago. It's just not that simple and as Microsoft's prices have come down the effort for many would be nothing but a boondoggle.
 
That sounds a lot like a dance-y roundabout way of saying, "No, I haven't tried version 4 and I'm not going to." Whatever, but don't try to tell everyone it can't do what you do if you haven't at least bothered attempting to see of the current version of Calc supports the stuff that you wanna use on it.

I mean, yeah, there's no way a monolithic lame-o company like BofA would switch from MS Office to LibreOffice with all that institutional momentum and I personally don't care if they do or not. I just think you're making some unqualified claims about the functionality of a product you're not familiar with. That'd be like me saying Office sucks because Clippy keeps asking me if I want help writing a letter, but not knowing that Clippy has been gone for like 80 years.
 
That sounds a lot like a dance-y roundabout way of saying, "No, I haven't tried version 4 and I'm not going to."

Totally ironic, I was installing LibreOffice on my SP3 as I was writing that post. How many times have you mentioned that you don't even use MS Office? And how many times have you actually loaded a real, complex financial industry spreadsheet created in Excel into LibreOffice? I've done it three times and the results were never 100%.

You seem to think that I am attacking a product when I'm simply saying that the conversion process isn't perfect. If the document had been created in LibreOffice from the start then the kinds of issues I'm talking about wouldn't probably exist.

I mean, yeah, there's no way a monolithic lame-o company like BofA would switch from MS Office to LibreOffice with all that institutional momentum and I personally don't care if they do or not.

And companies like that don't care if you care. Lame-o or not, countless billions of dollars flow through and are managed by these institutions. As I have mentioned before, it boils down to the value of the documents. If you're documents don't have high value then sure, go for the free stuff. But if they do, the cost of Office is insignificant.
 
Ya people never seem to get that when you are paying employees total compensation 50K and up $100 / year for anything that makes them more productive is nothing. And for a home user honestly its the same. I did the whole open office thing just wasn't worth the trouble to save a measly $100. As MS brings down the price and up the value of office that only becomes more true.

Here is the irony of it all. When smart phones took off you had all these companies who tried to become the office standard for smart phones, they tried to charge $15-30 for their product and had MS office compatibility. If Open/libre office cared that was their one chance they should have jumped in with completely free mobile office and they might have taken off. But once again as is almost always the problem with open source they just totally don't get it and missed the boat. Now MS is going to nail this monopoly down in mobile.
 
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