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Do you believe that Windows could be advanced further if Microsoft did not try to cater to a wider audience?

I can't help but think that the designers and developers of Windows are being held back by business suits who tell them to cater to a lower common denominator.
I'm quite happy that Microsoft has decided to try and maintain a consistent system requirements across it's versions. What that does is allow me to install Windows 10 (or 7 or 8.1 for that matter) on a system built for Windows Vista and have a better experience.

Not only do the requirements not change but the performance has actually gotten better. The previous 2 versions of Windows has ran better than the last one. I don't necessary expect this trend to continue with 10 as I expect it to perform almost identically to 8.1, but it's still better than each version requiring significantly higher requirements like they have done before.
 
Anyone can do without MS office if they force the issue, for most when you are already paying employees 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars a couple hundred for MS office is nothing. Even in a small business its simply not worth the hassle to deal with libre office when all the large and other small businesses you interact with also use MS office. Now all of that only considers the lame employees who don't know what they are doing, when you get into more advanced capabilities and integration MS office blows libre office out of the way. If someone sells out the productivity of their entire work force to save a couple bucks all that is, is a bad IT manager trying to put a mark on his resume that said saved $X per year, and doesn't mention productivity losses. Trust me I know I had my years when I just tried to save money didn't work out and the amount of time I lost dealing with open source office wasn't worth it, same crap happened to me with photo editing and image manipulation gimp never gets popular for a reason.

I understand that and I've already stated that MS Office is the better choice for larger corporations and individuals who actually need all of the extra functionality. That doesn't change the fact that most people don't need all of that stuff and would do fine with Libre Office.
 
Office is really a platform these days and it has native clients across most major platforms including a web client so I think it's hard to nail down what is average anymore. Certainly a person editing a Office document these days on an iPad is pretty average. Of for that matter, even using Office on a cheap Windows 8.1 tablet.

Microsoft bundled a free one year subscription to Office 365 Personal with a ton of cheap Windows devices this holiday, many which were tablets. While desktop Office 2013 isn't ideal with touch it beats the snot out of LibreOffice in that area. And on these cheap 1 GB Atom devices Office runs considerably better as well.

At the end of the day, the price of Office compared to what it does and the cost of the labor that uses it peanuts. If LibreOffice and other free attainment solutions saved companies tons of money relative to other costs they'd have moved to the solutions in droves long ago. There's nothing new about these free Office solutions and I think they've regressed over the years compared to Office. Microsoft has made tons of mistakes with Windows and Xbox and its mobile platforms, but they just have made those kinds of mistakes with Office. Office isn't perfect but when compared to what it can do versus the competition it blows them out of the water.

You can call it whatever you like. MS Office has by far the most features but how many people outside of large corporations actually use them? The fact of the matter is that most people don't need all of the things that MS Office can do. That being said, Libre Office can, indeed, serve as an adequate replacement. Whether or not people choose to use it as such is a different matter entirely.
 
I understand that and I've already stated that MS Office is the better choice for larger corporations and individuals who actually need all of the extra functionality. That doesn't change the fact that most people don't need all of that stuff and would do fine with Libre Office.

Ya but that leads to other problems. First if you are a regular individual whom probably uses MS office at work, why would you want to learn a whole new program for your short needs at home? Even if that's not the case you probably don't want to waste much time in a program you only use for basic stuff, you just want to be able to sit down and have it work, and or sit down and have something your friends and family know how it works and can teach you or direct you when a problem arises. So you use MS office.. For all these reason most people fine Libre office to just not be worth it afterall if you are just a regular user like wordpad is good enough. Libre office isn't good enough for prime time and its too much for basic use, its just a product in the middle whos open source community is too hard headed to make it anything more than a MS office copy that cannot even gain wide spread acceptance when its free.
 
Nobody really needs the functionality of Office. If corporations are creating their own Office based business critical applications they're totally lost business wise. The workers should concentrate on their own business instead of becoming application developers/maintainers.

Office based applications hit hard walls real soon, they're relatively easy to create but a total nightmare to maintain. Office should be used only for the very simple tasks such as simple spreadsheets and word files - everything else is best handled by specialist applications purpose built for the job by professionals.
 
Nobody really needs the functionality of Office. If corporations are creating their own Office based business critical applications they're totally lost business wise. The workers should concentrate on their own business instead of becoming application developers/maintainers.

Office based applications hit hard walls real soon, they're relatively easy to create but a total nightmare to maintain. Office should be used only for the very simple tasks such as simple spreadsheets and word files - everything else is best handled by specialist applications purpose built for the job by professionals.

No one really needs all of the functionality in LibreOffice either. But when you're talking about a billion plus Office users, you have no idea when anyone will need or want certain functionality.

As for Office applications, you've seen to much sloppy VBA code. Office applications can be developed any number of ways, .NET, JavaScript, etc. and they can be very effective and robust. I've developed a number of the years that have been well received by my customers. Like anything else, it helps to know what you're doing, which is often why many homegrown Office apps get unwieldy.
 
Ya but that leads to other problems. First if you are a regular individual whom probably uses MS office at work, why would you want to learn a whole new program for your short needs at home? Even if that's not the case you probably don't want to waste much time in a program you only use for basic stuff, you just want to be able to sit down and have it work, and or sit down and have something your friends and family know how it works and can teach you or direct you when a problem arises. So you use MS office.. For all these reason most people fine Libre office to just not be worth it afterall if you are just a regular user like wordpad is good enough. Libre office isn't good enough for prime time and its too much for basic use, its just a product in the middle whos open source community is too hard headed to make it anything more than a MS office copy that cannot even gain wide spread acceptance when its free.

Libre Office wasn't designed and written by an alein race in a distant galaxy. If a person can use Word and Excel then Writer and Calc aren't the impossibilities that you're making them out to be.

Why do millions of people use Firefox or Chrome when IE has been there for the past two decades? Why does anyone use Winamp or Foobar or VLC when Windows Media Player has been there since the dawn of time?

As far as it not gaining widespread acceptance when it's free, well, were you expecting any different? Acceptance has very little to do with price especially when MS Office has had such a stranglehold on the market for such a long time. People and businesses are going to stick with what they know so MS Office would probably still be the market leader by association even if a better alternative were available. Firefox and Chrome are free but IE is installed by default on 95% of the computers in the world.
 
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I didn't say they are impossibilities but the fact is as someone who has used both you don't just sit down and go, different buttons in different places, little differences here and there. For a normal user this stuff is often not worth the hassle when you can just pay a couple hundred bucks for what you are used to. The reality is a lot of people value their time more than the open source proponents think people should.

And yes now you are starting to get it if libre office ever wants to make serious inroads they need to start thinking about out competing office not just playing catch up. In the case of firefox and chrome it was because IE was failing to meet consumer needs. Same with WMP, ultimately most of it for media comes down to MS not including various codecs to support media. So this is what Libre office needs to do identify short comings in MS office and fix them, what is mind numbing stupid is how they have failed to do that in such simple issues for so many years.
 
Most people who buy office is because they simply do not know about the free alternative.

To heatlessun: I've seen office use lead to huge trouble in many companies. Every application that's built on office is a make-shift one. How do you update 100 000 item catalogs to Office each month automatically? How do you maintain CRM etc. info online with Office (and no, Outlook does not work in this role lol). The biggest problem with home grown Office applications is that they're someones private project, if that person dies or moves away the company is left bare naked flopping on the rocks.

In most cases Office based solutions are a rushed response to some acute need. Instead of charting for proper solutions, someone started to reinvent the wheel and creates something that works for him and at that moment. Roll forward a few years and in most cases the Excel etc. contains outdated information that's too laborous to update but people keep on using it and try to cover up the bad data by using multipliers etc. :)

I see it happen all the time.
 
I didn't say they are impossibilities but the fact is as someone who has used both you don't just sit down and go, different buttons in different places, little differences here and there. For a normal user this stuff is often not worth the hassle when you can just pay a couple hundred bucks for what you are used to. The reality is a lot of people value their time more than the open source proponents think people should.

And yes now you are starting to get it if libre office ever wants to make serious inroads they need to start thinking about out competing office not just playing catch up. In the case of firefox and chrome it was because IE was failing to meet consumer needs. Same with WMP, ultimately most of it for media comes down to MS not including various codecs to support media. So this is what Libre office needs to do identify short comings in MS office and fix them, what is mind numbing stupid is how they have failed to do that in such simple issues for so many years.

Different buttons in different places? You don't say? Seriously, that's your reasoning? You can say the same thing about Firefox and Chrome when compared to IE or Winamp and Foobar when compared to Windows Media Player. Ever application is going to have a different UI and hence different buttons in different places.

No matter how you slice it, millions of people use Libre Office just as millions use Firefox, Chrome, etc. So it hasn't overtaken MS Office? Again, did you really expect it to overtake a two-decades long market leader in a few years? You said it yourself, people are used to MS Office just as they are used to Windows and IE. The fact of the matter is, for most people, it could replace Office. If most people had to work with Libre Office instead of MS Office, they'd be largely unaffected. The only ones who would be hurt are larger businesses.
 
The fact of the matter is, for most people, it could replace Office. If most people had to work with Libre Office instead of MS Office, they'd be largely unaffected. The only ones who would be hurt are larger businesses.

I agree. Office is the defacto software for Office suites. But, most users could easily get by with LibreOffice. EASY. For most, they do basic spreadsheets, homework on a word processor, etc.. Just basic needs.

MS Office can be extremely powerful, but for most basic home users, they really don't need it. They use it because it's familiar, got it for cheap at school, same as they use at work, they don't know of alternatives, etc...
 
I see it happen all the time.

I've seen it happen all the time as well. But the problem you're talking about isn't a technical one but one of process. Excel and Word are extremely powerful front end tools and have the ability to use relational databases as services like any front end application. Sure people can create a messes with Office apps because they don't know what they are doing. But when you know what you are doing such applications are no different than anything else. And they can be very effective as a lot of these use capabilities in Office. And it's generally easier to hook Office into a service or database than trying to recreate Office functionally.
 
I've seen it happen all the time as well. But the problem you're talking about isn't a technical one but one of process. Excel and Word are extremely powerful front end tools and have the ability to use relational databases as services like any front end application. Sure people can create a messes with Office apps because they don't know what they are doing. But when you know what you are doing such applications are no different than anything else. And they can be very effective as a lot of these use capabilities in Office. And it's generally easier to hook Office into a service or database than trying to recreate Office functionally.

I respectfully disagree. Whatever you do with Office tools, you're still pitifully limited to the interface of said tools and the 'applications' become a glue-on instead of being purpose built from scratch - even when the coder knows his stuff.

But now we veered off point - the question was does an average user need real office - in most cases the answer is no. I have been using solely libre/openoffice and OSX Numbers for years even at work place and there has yet to be the day that I needed MS Office. I have to frequently deal with Words and Excel files sent by our customers by the way.

The only time a user 'needs' MS Office is when he works at a company that has made the IMHO very poor decision to start to build their business critical apps on Office. Even then, at home, he could easily use the free tools.

To me it seems just stupid to pay for something you can get for free.
 
Different buttons in different places? You don't say? Seriously, that's your reasoning? You can say the same thing about Firefox and Chrome when compared to IE or Winamp and Foobar when compared to Windows Media Player. Ever application is going to have a different UI and hence different buttons in different places.

No matter how you slice it, millions of people use Libre Office just as millions use Firefox, Chrome, etc. So it hasn't overtaken MS Office? Again, did you really expect it to overtake a two-decades long market leader in a few years? You said it yourself, people are used to MS Office just as they are used to Windows and IE. The fact of the matter is, for most people, it could replace Office. If most people had to work with Libre Office instead of MS Office, they'd be largely unaffected. The only ones who would be hurt are larger businesses.

You don't seem to be comprehending the situation and rational differences. Chrome and fire fox have been able to gain large market share, some estimate Chrome at nearly 50%, firefox played with 25% for years. That is a completely different than the measly couple %libre office commands.

Second using firefox and chrome as I clearly stated was about major user features. One of the simplest things that made a huge difference to run of the mill customers? Spell checking, by default completely absent from IE for countless years after firefox had it fully implemented. Other issues, included software, now days chrome ships ready to go with java, and other common plugins that require installs on IE. Third firefox and chrome as well as other browsers do not take any significant amount of time to learn nor do they have countless buttons like an office suite consisting of not just countless buttons and functions but multiple separate applications. No their interface and function is less than 10 buttons at the top of the application and has been for years word on the other hand has 10 buttons before you even get into the first ribbon, it has 9 ribbons each one stuffed with buttons and features.

As a person who has used MS office extensively it has major short comings. The irony, on each short coming I would go install libre or open office to see if they did it any better, result? They didn't lol. and that was all you ever needed to know about where they are going with those applications. MS will continuously piss users off with changes in features etc... But typically the open source variants will be so far behind they wont have even gotten to the features either. Sorry the development culture inside open office is a failure and as such all it is, is a product for cheap skates who don't value their own time in any way.
 
The only time a user 'needs' MS Office is when he works at a company that has made the IMHO very poor decision to start to build their business critical apps on Office. Even then, at home, he could easily use the free tools.

To me it seems just stupid to pay for something you can get for free.

This argument about Office and free alternatives has been going on for two decades now with whatever flavor of the month free alternative is in vogue. If it were anywhere as simple as you're describing at cost MS Office would have gone away long ago. As it stands MS Office pricing isn't exactly a king's ransom on a person by person basis. If you're going to pay an MBA a 6 figure salary, saving the 35 cents a day it costs to run Office is pennywise and pound foolish.

As for average users, I've believed said if something works for you then use it and LibreOffice can certainly work for a lot of people. Like anything mileage varies.
 
Office made document editing, spreadsheets etc mainstream and accessible to everyone, since almost everyone with a computer at work had it.

Without Office, there's no competing alternatives like Open/Libre of course. But there also wouldn't be any Google docs, ubiquitous rich text entry on web pages, and standardized document formats, open doc alliance etc.

We'd have a bunch of shitty proprietary formats like in WordPerfect, Lotus, pdf and god knows what else which would never interoperate and you'd need to buy a bunch of converters every time.

So its all fine to say 'Office is bloated' now, but at least give credit where its due. And there isn't a better deal out today than $20/year for the entire Office365 suite + local installs + unlimited OneDrive storage.
 
Office made document editing, spreadsheets etc mainstream and accessible to everyone, since almost everyone with a computer at work had it.

Without Office, there's no competing alternatives like Open/Libre of course. But there also wouldn't be any Google docs, ubiquitous rich text entry on web pages, and standardized document formats, open doc alliance etc.

We'd have a bunch of shitty proprietary formats like in WordPerfect, Lotus, pdf and god knows what else which would never interoperate and you'd need to buy a bunch of converters every time.

So its all fine to say 'Office is bloated' now, but at least give credit where its due. And there isn't a better deal out today than $20/year for the entire Office365 suite + local installs + unlimited OneDrive storage.

Funny you should mention it but Microsoft has made its best to mess up compatibility in formats in order to both force consumers into buying new Office versions and make it difficult to impossible for the competition to use the office file formats.
 
Yes I agree but that was a long long time ago.

Back on topic, is anyone waiting for the CP build to come out on Jan 21? I have to say I'm really not happy with the Tech Preview - its just not as good as any earlier alpha build from MS.

e.g. it has a huge Explorer redraw bug that will mess up your task bar until you restart explorer.exe every few min. Its still there in 9878. It's fixed in 9901 but that build won't let you upgrade so I don't want to use it.
 
Yeah, I've been patiently waiting for a new build. This current one is shit. I can't believe they left us through the holidays with such a crappy build. A fixed one needs to come out ASAP...
 
I understand that and I've already stated that MS Office is the better choice for larger corporations and individuals who actually need all of the extra functionality. That doesn't change the fact that most people don't need all of that stuff and would do fine with Libre Office.
I think I'd rather just use the MS Office web-apps for casual work at home, rather than bother installing an entire office suite. Libre Office seems like massive overkill for casuals.
 
I think I'd rather just use the MS Office web-apps for casual work at home, rather than bother installing an entire office suite. Libre Office seems like massive overkill for casuals.

Uh say what? You can choose to install it partly if you wish and how exactly is FREE an overkill? LOL!
 
I'll gladly test the new version when its available. I'm tired of shitty random BSoDs that I never see with 8.1 Update 1.
 
I am running very similar hardware and have not experienced a single BSOD or fault of any kind. Did clean install, single OS. No problems at all.
 
No BSODs here on Windows 8.1. You have a system problem, not an OS problem.

I think you misread that. He said he's getting BSODs on Windows 10 that he wasn't getting on 8.1 Update 1. ;)
 
Uh say what? You can choose to install it partly if you wish and how exactly is FREE an overkill? LOL!
I said INSTALLING a huge office suite (like LibreOffice or MS Office) seems like overkill for casuals (especially since LibreOffice requires the Java Runtime Environment for certain features. Yuck).

I said nothing about the pricetag being overkill. Your question is nonsense.

Like I said before, I'd rather just use the Microsoft Office web-apps...which are also free. Nothing to install, always up-to-date, full Office compatibility, everything I save is automatically synced to my desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone... tell me again why locally installing an office suite makes sense for casual users?
 
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I said INSTALLING a huge office suite (like LibreOffice or MS Office) seems like overkill for casuals (especially since LibreOffice requires the Java Runtime Environment for certain features. Yuck).

I said nothing about the pricetag being overkill. Your question is nonsense.

Like I said before, I'd rather just use the Microsoft Office web-apps...which are also free. Nothing to install, always up-to-date, full Office compatibility, everything I save is automatically synced to my desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone... tell me again why locally installing an office suite makes sense for casual users?

You're not making any sense whatsoever. Libreoffice is no more large than MS office the only difference is that you get it for free. What's your option then, not open the files at all? LOL! And Libreoffice works just fine without the java by the way.

HDD space is dirt cheap these days you must be joking to worry about a couple of gigs.
 
I don't see what the problem is. Office web version is almost fully feature complete and same as the desktop edition, its not some very feature limited editor like Google docs.

He's saying he just wants to open his office docs in the web apps, which are free, have tons more features, have zero install, and in addition have sync integration with OneDrive. You'd have to be crazy to use something like LibreOffice which has zero benefits in comparison.
 
I don't see what the problem is. Office web version is almost fully feature complete and same as the desktop edition, its not some very feature limited editor like Google docs.

He's saying he just wants to open his office docs in the web apps, which are free, have tons more features, have zero install, and in addition have sync integration with OneDrive. You'd have to be crazy to use something like LibreOffice which has zero benefits in comparison.

Because Microsoft. :D That gentleman up above would never, ever say anything good about them no matter how good a thing they are doing. Hopefully, he will eventually grow out of it and realize there is more to do with computers then he wants to believe.
 
I'm really looking forward to upgrading from win7 to win10cp and am a bit surprised by the lack of chatter and leaks.
 
I don't see what the problem is. Office web version is almost fully feature complete and same as the desktop edition, its not some very feature limited editor like Google docs.

He's saying he just wants to open his office docs in the web apps, which are free, have tons more features, have zero install, and in addition have sync integration with OneDrive. You'd have to be crazy to use something like LibreOffice which has zero benefits in comparison.

Web apps? Oh yes I can see how convenient it is to upload your multi-megabyte files to onedrive first, then edit them and download them back lol.

I have 140/40Mb/s connection so it might even be usable but most probably don't.

I see the ability to handle your files locally as a huge benefit in comparison.
 
Web apps? Oh yes I can see how convenient it is to upload your multi-megabyte files to onedrive first, then edit them and download them back lol.

I have 140/40Mb/s connection so it might even be usable but most probably don't.

I see the ability to handle your files locally as a huge benefit in comparison.

If you're someone that can get away with a free alternative to Office then you probably don't have any huge files.
 
If your Word documents and Excel sheets are inordinately large, you're probably using the wrong tools for the task.

For PowerPoint decks, I can kind of understand the concern. But most Office users aren't creating many large presentations, if any.

Also, you don't drop files into OneDrive, edit them on the web and then download them. You just drop them in your OneDrive for delta changes to sync back.
 
If you use Windows 8 with an MS account, which I do, the default save location for documents is OneDrive. These are then locally synced as well. Any changes made are synced using the delta only.

The ability to actually access and edit all your documents from any web browser (e.g. at an airport) with a full Office interface is huge. You don't need a fast connection to do it either. I think its perfectly acceptable for a lot of people and nothing prevents you from downloading an Office alternative and using it as well for local editing. The beauty is that the changes will still get uploaded and if you are on another pc you can use the web apps. I have nothing against the hard work doen by these devs and appreciate them as well.
 
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I got my office from technetplus, I am using office 2010, there is no need to update office everytime a new version comes out.

However now that technet is gone, office365 is probably the best option for those who dont want to pirate and dont own any existing office licenses.
 
If you're someone that can get away with a free alternative to Office then you probably don't have any huge files.

You're not making any sense again. Office is needed only for scripted homebrew monstrosities. A large file can be just simple data. For example customer sends his price catalog of 120 000 items, dumped out of SAP.
 
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