The assumption underlying this whole article is that you don't "need" Office to do work. That somehow iStuff will fill in your missing productivity suite. This just isn't backed by reality.
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
Is there honestly any real competition in that field from tablets and iStuff and the like? No. Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but work is done on a desktop, where you need to do a lot of typing and clicking. The interface is simply better for that.
Moreover, Microsoft Office has pretty much nailed its niche: I challenge you to find a better office suite. Here's what you'll have to do:
1. Find me an office suite that works out-of-the-box.
2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email, database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet, simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
3. Find me an office suite that does (2) fairly well.
4. Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
There's some nifty stuff on the net as thin clients running in HTML5. There's some cool stuff happening in tablets. But the author is sorely mistaken in presuming that the world has somehow moved past Office.
EDIT: And yes, I've tried Google Docs and OpenOffice and WordPerfect and all these things--but for raw "get the bidness done" Office is pretty much it.
EDIT2: And Word's spellchecker could've saved me. >:(
> The assumption underlying this whole article is that you
> don't "need" Office to do work. That somehow iStuff will
> fill in your missing productivity suite. This just isn't
> backed by reality.
It's absolutely backed by reality. Just because some offices will or can not doesn't mean it's impossible.
> 2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email,
> database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet,
> simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
No.
Microsoft has convinced folks that they need one suite that does all of these things. This is patently not true. For example: I can use GMail, Keynote, Basecamp, and RTF documents to do everything I need to do, with heavier publishing-style stuff in Pages. If I need to interact with folks using Office, iWork has never failed to fill in that role.
Just because you're stuck in Office-land doesn't mean you have to be.
You're suggesting that Microsoft has brainwashed the global business community into thinking they need a single suite to perform those tasks? I'd say it's more plausible that they arrived at that conclusion on their own since it just works better
I think it's more like it's the low-friction way to go. Most enterprises do not have as their core mission the production of documents. Dealing with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. is a requirement but it's not their core business mission. Spending time identifying, installing, and managing a hodgepodge of other software to do what Office does has no return on investment. Specifying the standard complement of software for an employee PC becomes a 2-second exercise: Office. Done. Now I can think about something that might add value to what we do as a business.
I don't think that it would be a terrific stretch to say that any business outside of programming/webdev/design/etc with greater than 90% certainty uses Office.
Hell, a few years ago on one of my professional engineering exams I had a section devoted to macros in Excel. Just because we know of and use other tools doesn't make our experience the norm.
(and for what it's worth, I do my note-taking on gmail, my typesetting in latex, my math in octave, and my presentations in libreoffice...and still use Office at work because--hey, guess what--that's what I know is the common denominator for everyone)
I'm not disagreeing with you on the "lots of businesses use Office" point. It's true, and there's no getting around it.
The point of the article (also of my comment) wasn't "Nobody ever needs Office again" or "nobody uses Office anymore." That's silly, of course it's used. And it's not a bad product.
So a lot of businesses use Office. Great, we've established that point. But more to TFA's point: a lot of folks can get by fine without Office. You and I already knew we could avoid it. But now, folks who used to rely on Office are buying iPads and Macs (for instance) and getting productive things done without Office, whereas before they might not have realized they could do that.
>I can use GMail, Keynote, Basecamp, and RTF documents to do everything I need to do, with heavier publishing-style stuff in Pages. If I need to interact with folks using Office, iWork has never failed to fill in that role.
Do you use all of these only on the iPad or the iPhone, including Pages?
> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
Microsoft Office basically doesn't satisfy this requirement itself.
I get frustrated with LibreOffice not importing files correctly, but then when I went to an Office 2007 to attempt to import an Office 2003 file, I found it was also failing to import correctly there.
The .doc format is such garbage that they can't even manage to import it correctly in their own software reliably.
Well, I've had a different experience. More than once. So I'd say it's not that extremely unlikely.
Maybe my lawyer has a really old version of Word or something and he keeps sending me files in an old format that isn't supported as well.
I've also had a lot of files opened flawlessly by LibreOffice; it depends on how many features you're using. Maybe you're trading documents that aren't that complicated?
Word has its flaws, yes, just like anything else. Still, I've tried every other thing available, and nothing comes close.
You see, it is the word processor for all the non-techie people out there. They have no idea how to properly use it (and pc's in general), so they blame Word for all their faults.
LibreOffice, on the other hand, has much more competent userbase (in average), and despite the lack of certain features LibreOffice has more positive image.
It would be helpful if you could indicate what is missing or what you mean by correctly importing.
If there are no detailed Word error messages or diagnostics, perhaps you could ask your lawyer to send you a PDF or paper version, so you can tell if there are any differences.
I for one would be very attentive to the possibility of missing or incorrect information in legal documents...
Are you sure your lawyer is even using Word? Many still use word perfect. I was just at the office of a state legislature yesterday and they are 100% a word perfect shop.
In my experience, OpenOffice/LibreOffice screws up non-trivial formatting on import, and Microsoft Office screws up non trivial embeddings from previous versions. I've had both screw up old Word documents.
I prefer LibreOffice when I need to open old files -- the format is often botched, but all the content is always there -- which was not my experience with Microsoft Word.
Also, in my experience LibreOffice will happily open documents Microsoft Office complains about as being corrupt.
I think the aurthors point isn't that there is no point for Office, it is that for a lot of people, they do not need a full suite. My father was a die hard 'I need Office' person, and then he got an HP Touchpad during the firesale. Turns out he just needs basic word processing/spreadsheeting capability, and hasn't opened office on his laptop since.
If Microsoft would have had an app for the Touchpad, he would have bought it, and wouldn't have seen how overpriced and over featured it was for his needs.
This is a crack in Microsoft's armor, and could lead to long term issues.
Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code. Porting it to webOS is a laughable proposition with the amount of devices it sold. And calling it an 'app' is disingenuous, it's a full fledged suite.
Microsoft is right in waiting for things to settle down before wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on such excursions. Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad? After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications.
"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code."
I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office". I know it takes a lot of time and investment, but even if they released a subpar editor that was able to view it, they would have got his money and I highly doubt he would have complained.
"Porting it to webOS is a laughable proposition with the amount of devices it sold."
I agree, and I understand why they wouldn't. My point is that they lost a recurring customer by not creating it. Think of it similar to the police response to a bank robbery. I can guarantee that the cost of the response is several orders of magnitude greater than amount even in the bank, let alone what the thieves are actually able to steal. That is because they are not reacting to the cost of the money being stolen, but to the long term costs of making it seem like anyone can rob a bank. If Microsoft made an App for EVERY platform, regardless of cost, it would be hard for anyone to even penetrate into the marketplace, therefore ensuring longer term success.
Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
"And calling it an 'app' is disingenuous, it's a full fledged suite."
Agreed, was only done for the sake of brevity. Easier than writing "an office app, a powerpoint app, and an excel app"
"Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad?"
Yes, several /years/ after its initial release, despite making up over 90% of the tablet market. Docs to go, a fully featured suite, was released within a couple weeks.
"After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications."
Not sure what you mean, iPad !== Windows arm tablets. And again, everyone expects Windows software of windows hardware. The discussion at hand is Windows software on non windows hardware, which is how they made their millions to begin with.
>"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code." I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office"
Unquestioningly bend to the capricious whims and desires of non-technical users, a winning strategy for any tech business.
Last month a user told me I should add full-fledged accounting and payroll management to my niche software so he doesn't have to buy QuickBooks. Better get cracking!
Obviously I do not believe that you should listen to all user requests, in fact I think that most can be ignored. However, I do not think my dad is unlike a lot of our dads/cousins/in-laws/familynontechie. I truly believe that a majority of non technical people would by "Office™ for X" simply because of the first word, and /that/ is when you start to listen to your customers.
Microsoft is not a niche software company. They dump billions down holes every year for completely fruitless projects. They could have easily bought dataviz, called documents to go Office Mobile, and called it a day.
> My point is that they lost a recurring customer by not creating it. Think of it similar to the police response to a bank robbery. I can guarantee that the cost of the response is several orders of magnitude greater than amount even in the bank, let alone what the thieves are actually able to steal. That is because they are not reacting to the cost of the money being stolen, but to the long term costs of making it seem like anyone can rob a bank. If Microsoft made an App for EVERY platform, regardless of cost, it would be hard for anyone to even penetrate into the marketplace, therefore ensuring longer term success.
I don't think shareholders would appreciate MS throwing money at every platform at launch.
>Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
That is because the search market is huge, whereas Office software for a tablet that only sold when it was a final firesale.. not so much.
And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch.
"I don't think shareholders would appreciate MS throwing money at every platform at launch."
The "Office" market is huge, as well. And they like what makes them money. I am not saying they should do this on every platform, I am saying that they risk losing customers with every platform that comes out that they do not have one for. While my specific example was the touchpad, the same argument applies to the iPad and Android markets.
"And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch."
HP didn't make the touchpad, Palm did. Palm was not an office oriented company, they were a device oriented company. Secondly, Docs to go does it regularly, and has done it for over a decade. Again, this is not about bringing over the codebase to new platforms, it is about branding a product with similar functionality on every platform.
"Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation."
Haven't we had this discussion way too many times before? How many HN stories have there been of "look at the feat of content creation this person pulled off with an iThing!"?
Specific varieties of work are best suited to the desktop computing UI paradigm. That's distinctly different from "iThings are just content consumption devices." It's insufficiently rigorous thinking; also it's bullshit.
Warren Ellis has written tremendous amounts of his serious work on a (non-iOS) mobile device. Mark O'Connor made an iPad his primary coding device [1]. Atomic Tom could perform a song off of just iThings as instruments on the subway.
Please stop repeating the 'mobile devices are just for content consumption' meme. It's bullshit.
EDIT: Also, you'll note that from your own posted link the author had to get a wireless keyboard. There was nothing he accomplished there that couldn't have been done just as well (and possibly more cheaply) using a netbook.
I don't think author means to claim the world has moved on. Early adopters have, and as the tablet replaces the desk/lap-tops with internet everywhere, Office will be irrelevant.
1. Google Docs.
2. Gmail, Google Docs [Free]
3. Google Docs
4. Google Docs can preview / edit. You just need internet.
I haven't used office in ages. I consider myself a fairly early adopter of technology and yes I've moved on. My mom has not, I don't think she ever will.
It's like mobile phones made wrist watch redundant. But people still wear them for:
I work in the legal field and they will never, ever use Google Docs for anything. You do not put important documents on another company's computers and you especially don't do that if they are in the U.S. (They ban dropbox for the same reason).
I wonder if they've consider developing a Google Apps appliance, a contained webserver (physical or virtual) with just a simple API to store and load documents, email, etc. You'd load the software from 'the cloud', which would then call the appliance on the LAN to get your stuff.
Seems to satisfy the privacy requirements while keeping the more maintenance heavy components on their machines.
Tablets won't replace the desktop/laptop. Augment, sure, but they aren't going to kill them off, especially in the workplace. They're different devices with different functions--it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven.
Google Docs is great for consumption, sure, but for creation it's so-so (especially compared with better, dedicated tools), and there's no guarantee it won't be sunsetted when it ceases to help funnel meat into Google's advertising maw.
> it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven
Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.
Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already.
Connecting to peripherals is irrelevant in the tablet takeover. In fact, tablets are irrelevant in the tablet takeover. What's going to happen is that the tablet OS and app ecosystem will reign while the form factor becomes whatever is convenient for the task at hand.
Media consumption? Tablet. Work? Unknown form factor, but with correct input/output attached and running the same software as the media tablet.
"Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already."
Things is, what platform is going to be the best at switching modes between desktop and tablet, with full support for multiple monitors, printing, VPN etc, stuff business will like? Windows 8.
I'm not going to lie--if I could get a job where I flopped out on beanbags and did all my work on a tablet, that'd be pretty nifty. I just don't see using a tablet for content creation and having to sit at a normal desk.
Good point. Perhaps the problem is the work station and not the device itself. Still, the way tablets work now, they have to be at a fairly low angle, or one's hands will quickly get tired. That coupled with lack of real world applications doesn't seem to align very well with tablet's possible ubiquitous future.
Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.
Google Office suite will not be replacing Microsoft Office in the business world for a long time, until Google figures out how to make GOffice properly format and consistently display their documents. I write a lot of sheet music and guitar tablature in GDocs (so I can get to it on a tablet when I get the call that a friend's guitarist didn't show up), and it seems every few months there is an update that breaks the formatting completely.
Granted, writing music in GDocs isn't a common use case, but advanced formatting is the way of business. If Google can't get it right, they can't get business right.
Current Google Docs functionality comparable with WordPad, like it or not. Same for Live office suite, Zoho, etc.
They are just unusable for complex documents containing multiple columns, continuous sections, multilevel lists, multiple page layouts in a document, etc, etc, etc.
The basic stuff such as saving character, paragraph and table styles is not there yet.
I wouldn't say that iStuff fills in your "missing productivity suite", more that for most people the productivity suite wasn't needed to begin with. The browsers text box goes a lot farther than people give it credit for (meta using it right now). Even within corporations once wiki's are introduced (a decade old at this point?) it feels like nearly all of the reason for "docs" to exists disappear overnight. And email is replaceable with hundreds of other solutions. After you remove those two from MS Office what is left isn't a list of applications that everyone uses all of the time. This isn't a case of early adopters either. I rarely use MS office apps and that usage pattern started more than a decade ago.
So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny. I've worked in places that, being that tiny, still refused to setup something that helpful.
As for email--yes, there are hundreds of alternatives, but somehow we keep coming back to email, and when we need to guarantee that somebody else can communicate with us, that's what we use. I've had Skype updates break. I've had Google Chat randomly disappear or be inaccessible. I've had AIM clients (of many varieties) die on me. Email, barring the normal issues you see with it, is always there.
For email specifically referring to the plethora of server and client alternatives such as hotmail, gmail, kmail, procmail, sendmail, email on your phone, etc
>So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny.
This is completely false in my experience.
1) Businesses use wikis all the time. The last 4 places I've worked at have had department wikis. This includes a University, a Mega-Bank, a family owned e-tailer, and a medium-sized consulting firm, which hits just about every size business you can have aside from "start-up".
2) Getting a wiki set up is trivial. For the large companies you request the IT side to give you a VM and an address on the intranet. For the small companies it's usually a spare box and an address on the intranet. It's dead simple.
Also I suspect you would be surprised at how much leeway managers have in choosing collaboration mediums. Email is the old standby, yes, but many managers will choose other ways to collaborate within their department. Most businesses have an IM server for internal chats as well.
I think that depends very much on which large company. Where I work, getting a wiki setup on a machine I don't control would be an absolute nightmare. We're talking conference calls, forms, requirements docs, project numbers, discussions over funding, etc... It would be horrible. It took us 2 years just to get new servers.
Actually, there are box solutions for corporate portals (which I guess include wiki or other communication/knowledge sharing tools). They're kind of a hot topic. Business are adopting.
Businesses deploy internal wikis all the time, they just quickly get abandoned because the managers who decide they are needed don't actually use them themselves.
> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.
I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.
Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.
I very much agree that currently there is no heavy competition to MS Office.
However, I think there is an interesting scenario that during the coming years, tablets and laptops might converge, into "convertible laptops" such as the Asus Transformer prime.
If Apple were to introduce such a device, that ran iOS in tablet mode, but OSX in laptop form, that could be a very real alternative to MS. Apple could then capitalize on the consumer desire for tablets, to move users from MS platform to Mac platform, where Apple have a good office suite in iWork.
Such a scenario could open up real competition on office suites.
Until then though, I agree that iOS or Android won't come anywhere near threatening Office, and it's a bit misguided of the author to announce the coming death of the market leader, based on a few personal experiences by himself and his wife.
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
iWork does okay in this sort of setting. In enterprise there is zero competition for MS Office though. The main hangups are Excel and Outlook (not email, but large group collaboration). Document writing (Word) and presentations (Powerpoint) have mostly been figured out and passed by in some cases.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
I've tried StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, WordPerfect, and every other option available. Nothing comes close to Word in functionality. Sure you can write a few paragraphs and do rich text in any of those options, but if you're doing anything at all complicated you need more.
And yet LibreOffice Calc works as well as Excel in almost every way that I've used it.
And Outlook...I don't know a sysadmin who doesn't hate Outlook or (especially) Exchange. It's true, though, that no one else really has that functionality together in a reasonable package. Talk about a vulnerable product to target, though; I guess GMail is trying to take it down, though I would have a hard time trusting Google to manage all of my email. Nothing against Google, but their tech-support is practically nonexistent, so if there WERE a problem, there's no recourse.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
And you've hit on the main problem with replacing Office. Everyone seems to use 10 different features from each application and those features don't seem to overlap. When I write documents I generally need something simple so my feature set for a writer is simple and mostly covered.
OTOH, I use a lot of Excel features that simply don't exist in other products. A big one used to be pivot tables, but those have been replicated somewhat. The problem is that Excel moved the bar further by adding more features like essentially being a window into MSAS and allowing users to build pivot tables and reports directly from data housed in MSAS.
And yeah, Exchange is a PITA to manage (it has gotten better, 5.5 was a nightmare), but it's still the best group collaboration, email, calendaring, scheduling, whatever else it does platform out there.
Google Apps customers (i.e. people who are replacing Exchange with gmail) have access to tech support for Gmail. The folks who respond are pretty good (as tech support folks go).
I sometimes make the joke with my business friends "What type of Office suite are you?". Because all their jobs basically come down to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, or a combination of all three.
Those tools are still used big time in the business world (which is magnificently bigger than this community).
It's not just the tools that are used. As Microsoft (and OpenOffice folks) understood in the 90's, it's all about file formats.
On one hand, you have things like CSV which Excel understands but doesn't prefer... easily generatable from a database or flat-file even using comamnd line cut/sed/awk.
On the other hand you have XLS(X) - which a TON of enterprise software generates - because it works better on Excel (lockin!) and supports things CSV doesn't (multi-sheet files, formatting, even pivot tables and such).
To win or even compete in this space you need to support the file formats - Apple's Numbers supports XLSX, but the feature support is minimal and lots of edge-conditions that are not present when using Excel crop up here (as with Libre/OpenOffice).
This author is blinded by what he actually does for a living: consulting on Apple products and writing, again, (mostly) on Apple-related topics. When you step outside of the Apple bubble, you quickly realize that there's a much, much bigger world out there and Apple is almost nowhere to be seen.
People have already given some good reasons why this article is nonsense (or at least unnecessarily reductionist), but what pissed me off about it the most is the underlying assumption you see in so many anti-Microsoft articles: that the only reason anyone uses Microsoft products is because they don’t know any better.
This is such a juvenile, condescending, and back-patting way to look at Microsoft, and I’m fucking sick of it. I prefer Windows, I prefer Office, and I prefer C#, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET MVC. I used a Mac as my primary computer from 2007-2010, and I used Linux from 2010-2011, and I ended up back on Windows by choice. I used an iPhone, I used Android, and I ended up Windows Phone by choice. I’ve programmed in Ruby (Rails and Sinatra), Python, JavaScript, Node.js, and am currently writing an app in ASP.NET MVC by choice. I’ve used OpenOffice, I’ve used Google Docs, I’ve used Evernote, and currently use OneNote, Word, and Excel (backed by SkyDrive) by choice.
Implying people using Microsoft stuff are just sheeple who haven’t seen the light yet is as fucking stupid as claiming that people only use Apple products because of marketing and design. I have no problem with people using Apple products, Linux, or anything, I just hate the anti-Microsoft circle jerk that certain subsets of those communities sustain themselves on.
The setup was interesting, but I feel the conclusion was a little flat- Microsoft's biggest miss was that people found out they were big fat liars!?
I'm not sure I buy the central premise, though- I don't know anyone that does Office-style work on their iPhone, and very few that do on their iPad. I'm not sure if there is an optimal interface for editing spreadsheets, but an iPad sure as hell isn't it.
I'd like to think the conclusion is that Office-style work actually isn't that necessary most of the time. I'm sure there are jobs where some of the capabilities are required, or where there's a bunch of important VBA code lurking in a spreadsheet somewhere. But it seems a lot of people use Excel because they have a simple list to keep track of, or Office because it's easy to drag a bunch of pictures in, or Powerpoint because it's how one makes Powerpoints, where in many cases a simpler tool would work.
I should admit that I do not use my iPhone for productive work, except reading, because the tools I use, Latex, Bibdesk, Processing and Python, are not available on the phone, will never be, and would be ill-suited to it in any case.
I don't doubt that people consume office documents on their iPad, but I'm less convinced that people sit down and create whole spreadsheets with it. So there still needs to be some program on a computer somewhere for document creation.
You can consume Office documents natively on iOS - no iWorks required. The only reason people would be buying these would be to either modify or create their own documents.
Those numbers tell how many people have bought the apps, not how many actually uses it. I have all 3 on my iPad, but apart from some early playing around, I've not used them. On paper, it's a great idea, and they are very nicely made. However, it's just way too cumbersome in everyday business.
I'm sure a lot of people benefit from those apps, but I would be very surprised if the "regular-usage" numbers are anywhere near the sales numbers.
Yes, but the examples he uses, the iPhone, and iPad, are not usually used "to get work done". I think that most of the public sees and uses those devices as a consumption device. When it comes to creating, and "getting work done" so to speak, people will still pine for Office. (I say this, but as a happy Linux and mac user whom infrequency uses office, sometimes I do find myself booting the ole desktop into windows, to make sure everything looks good and is formatted properly in Office) That's for personal stuff though, in the biz world, I still see Office staying on top for quite some time.
People keep repeating this but I see no evidence for it being true. Instead I keep reading reports of companies replacing large numbers of laptops with iPads. Are those reports wrong? Are those companies supplying iPads so their employees can watch (consume) movies instead of working?
The iPad seems quite capable of handling moderate document creation. Add a BT keyboard and it becomes very similar to a low end laptop.
> Instead I keep reading reports of companies replacing large numbers of laptops with iPads. Are those reports wrong?
Care to link to some of these reports? I am curious to see if desktop/laptops are being replaced and if there are companies employees in the office with a tablet as their only work device.
What I find is that companies are buying tablets as additional devices to augment, not replace desktops and laptops. Thus I am very curious about the reports you have apparently been seeing.
Side question: Does anyone on HN know anyone in their company or friends circle whose sole work device is a tablet(traveling salesmen etc. are excluded) ?
>The iPad seems quite capable of handling moderate document creation. Add a BT keyboard and it becomes very similar to a low end laptop.
And you can make an octopus by nailing more legs to a dog. Doesn't make it a very good octopus though.
>Apple itself keeps saying that Fortune 500 companies are buying large quantities of iPads. They can't all be for consumption.
Why can't they all be for consumption?
The IDG report refers to business communication, which I am guessing is reading and writing emails.
Regarding the doctors, the article states this:
> In fact, Manhattan Research found that internet usage on the iPad was more common that doctor's internet access on cell and smartphones (18%), but still considerably less than their web access on desktops and laptops (55%).
I own multiple copies of office and use them every day, but the author has an interesting point. And that point isn't revealed through me, or even (probably) the person reading this comment, it's revealed through my mother.
My mom is an attorney and works with office every day. She's also in her 50s and not technologically fluent. But she got an iPhone. And then she got an iPad. She even got a keyboard for the iPad; which I rolled my eyes at, but that's where some of us are blind here. One of the first things she asked me was where office was--there is no doubt she would have purchased office had it been available--instead she downloaded a bunch of things (pages, docstogo, QuickOffice) and worked out which of those she likes. And she uses them a ton now; even to create documents.
Where I think the author is a bit off is in his assessment that the wizard has been revealed. I think Office is a good product for a lot of people and I think my mom would still buy it if they rolled one out for iOS (and I think they're working on it). Moreover, most corporate offices are deeply entrenched in office, and it will take years for that to change (my machine at work still comes with ie 7--how sick is that?). So, Microsoft still has time, but I think there's merit to the argument that they're behind and need to recover. Some damage has already been done, but it's not too late.
What the article overlooks is that the money Microsoft makes off selling individual copies of Office is a rounding error in their overall revenue. The money they make off selling thousand-seat licenses of Office, however, is not. The latter is not possible on iOS or Android.
I think you're absolutely right, but this falls in the category of a lot of the comments in this thread: the "for now" category. I think anyone who assumes that the iPad or something-like-the-iPad (Windows 8, if you like) isn't where the vast majority of the market is heading, is going to miss the boat. The history of business is filed with the tombstones of once profitable companies that missed the boat.
If Microsoft misses the boat it's not going to be because they didn't spend development time on unprofitable products like single-license Office for iPad. The winners of any movement are those who own the platform, Microsoft is correctly focusing their efforts there. The other option is to focus on software and become the next Atari.
Exactly. In other words, it would have been the PERFECT excuse for Microsoft to price-gouge the same customers that need thousand-seat Office licenses by not being able to offer them a discount.
Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.
Bollocks. Completely. Comparing people "getting things done" in Office to "getting things done" on their iPhone is ridiculous and I now refuse to further hear any opinion the author has.
They're getting along with out office on their phones and tablets... That's completely different. You can't just tell clients they don't need it. When someone sends me an excel spreadsheet riddled with VBA code, what else is going to open it. I don't like it but I am one of those people that needs it in order to work with others. Unless the author is saying people are now doing all their work on phones and tablets, some how I doubt it...
The author's biggest miss seems to be the realization that the range of computational devices and their application is growing exponentially and that Microsoft doesn't necessarily need to be in every game.
The iPhone and iPad are examples of computational expansion not necessarily a complete paradigm shift.
Besides, some of the stuff MS has shipped in the past few years (Win7, Office20##, WinPhone, etc.) seems to run pretty well. They might not be quite so bleeding edge anymore but it sure looks like a bunch of people are working hard on their products.
I think that the author's point is that they would be in a much better position if they were in every game. I agree.
Microsoft's biggest win is making people think they need them, and every platform they are not on is another chance for a customer to see that they don't need them to do their work. This is not the case with all of their customers, but I can't argue that it seems like a valid point.
Do they "need" to be on every platform? Not in the sense that they would fail as a company if they don't. Would it benefit them, their image, and their message? Without question.
The vast majority of the developing world. Many countries have never had wired internet but have 3G popping up everywhere. Hundreds of millions of people that have never owned and never will own a "desktop computer" are going to get smartphones by 2015.
Try to remember that the USA is less than 5% of the world's population. Most people don't have a desktop computer and never will. They're starting on smartphones now and as tablets become cheaper they will get those too.
I give people a little more credit than this article does... I don't think people felt that MS Office is the only way to get work done, rather it's the only way they want to know how to get work done.
For most people, it's a huge personal investment to learn something like excel/ppt/word. For many years, the value in learning something new just wasn't there (IE: I still can't drive stick cause I don't need to).
But now with the mobile revolution, people are open to a new software investment because of all the great things tablets and smartphones offer. In the process of using these devices, they are open to learning new things and then ultimately come to the revelation the author is talking about.
I'm not sure what MS could have done, but slapping Office on Android & iOS devices from the start would have helped. There's a reason google has hugely popular software in iOS, despite owning Android. I just think MS is too arrogant to go that route.
I've used all the popular office suites for mobile and they're all terrible. That's the elephant in the room here, not this Apple fanatic's extremely biased take on things.
When you've got so little horsepower there's only so much you can do. I can't imagine being able to provide feature parity and a usable interface for end users on a mobile device, not until these things get a lot more powerful. I constantly see end users struggling with these features which they need to do their jobs. I'm not sure if giving them a watered down experience is the big benefit this author things it is. They'll go crazy when they are told that track changes isn't supported or VB script or god knows what else.
I'm not sure if this is MS arrogance or an admission that an office replacement on your tiny phone isn't possible yet and/or end users aren't willing to deal with software with 1/100th the features. Didn't apple just do this with the newest version of Final Cut? Everyone thinks complex software is the problem, but when we take away the features "no one uses or understands" suddenly the silent majority comes out the woodwork.
The take away for the cult of apple types is that the silent majority is out there and dwarfs the walled garden/patent litigious world of Apple. Just because your sleepy intro to anthropology course at that local state u can mostly be taken with mobile tools doesn't mean everything can be. Life's different in the busienss world or when you need to get shit done with minimal fuss and don't care whether the hipster contigent is standing in line outside of the Apple store again for yet another disposable toy that does you absolutely no good.
I know its very satifsying to think you'er part of some revolution and laugh at the old guard, but I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing niche devices for residential/entertainment needs and the big "everything that is not mobile will die by 2011 at the latest" never materialized. This author is one of these guys, an Apple rapturist, and the rapture is always right around the corner.
Really HN? This is rated at the top of the site? A disposable "har har MS" essay by an extremely biased source. Frankly, we can do better.
I think the point is that people have been trained (either by MS or by themselves) that they need Office to get something done.
The copy of Word on my mother's computer was recently corrupted somehow. Printing didn't work, and if you tried Word became non-functional until you wiped out all stored preferences.
She didn't know what to do. She just wanted to type up recipes, little notes to friends, etc. My brother showed her TextEdit and she had what she needed. She is used to Word. When you need to type on the computer, you use Word.
But it's not like back when she was using her dissertation. I wouldn't expect people to type a dissertation in TextEdit. But when all you need is to type up little rich text documents, TextEdit works great.
I think there are a lot of people like that. They've been trained on Word and think they need word. Far a large number, there is tons of other software that can accomplish what they want.
What I got out of the article was the author's realization that because MS didn't have Office ready, people were forced to make due. They had to use Pages or Keynote. Or maybe they just used email directly. But some of those users learned that they don't really need Word... and that could be a dangerous trend for MS.
There are always people who need the features of Word, or some of the really advanced stuff in Excel.
But most users just type up text in Word and add a little formatting. Most users use Excel as a grid, sometimes putting a formula or two in. Powerpoint is used to write text, put up images, and animate a bit.
All those use cases can be easily replaced with other, simpler, software. Now that some users know that, they might stop buying Office.
The author claims MS failed to "take seriously" the iPad, but that's simply not true. He must be confusing them with Blackberry (RIMshot!). MS created Office 365, a completely web-based build of Office that is surprisingly standards-compliant and cross-platform. Furthermore they are planning to release a native build of Office for the iPad in 2012. I'm not sure how much more you can ask from them, especially considering (as others have noted) that these devices are designed for consuming content, not creating it.
I work with people who use Excel 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. There is no competitor to that product. Google Docs doesn't even scratch the surface. And, as much as I hate Word and think it's a poor authoring tool as well as a poor document layout tool, most people want one app that is a mix of both. For them, there is no competitor to Word.
Pivot tables (though I believe Google Docs has added this to some degree), the ability to cleanly import messy text data, the ability to select non-contiguous cells, keyboard short cuts, better charts, spell check. I'm sure there are a million more - Excel is actually a very impressive product.
Apple has consumer computing all sewn up. MS fans can't understand why.
Microsoft has business computing all sewn up. Apple fans can't understand why.
The asymmetry is that Microsoft seems to think it ought to own consumer computing as well, and is wasting billions trying to achieve that, while Apple is playing directly to it's strengths with almost pathological vigour and knows it's limitations.
As an aside this is why I think MS should have jumped into bed with Blackberry, not Nokia, on the phone front. Their natural market is corporate mobile communications, from which they could then attack the consumer market - actually just as BB did before Apple ran them off the smartphone road.
The thing is that nontechnical people want to use the same OS at home and at work. This is because of the differences between OSes and applications which trip them up. Microsoft is simply putting up consumer computing as a first line of defense against competitors trying to attack their hold on business computing.
Apple's chief weakness is that it doesn't really try to attack business computing, from what I can tell. That's all fine and dandy - consumer computing is rather large - but it essentially relegates them to second place because of Microsoft's dominance in business computing.
I think, like many others Microsoft did not take iPhone seriously back in 2007. Like everyone else, they also regret the fact that they did not "copy" the original device.
I think, what Microsoft really missed out on was getting the Metro UI mainstream earlier on. Not looking at what the Zune team was doing. They started with the UI innovation back in 2006, but MS just didnt take things seriously.
Their primary mistake in all of their hardware decisions has been making hardware at all. They will always be a software company that made billions putting their software on other people's hardware. They should have been trying to put XBox Live on the PS2, they should have been trying to put Office on the iPhone, they should have been trying to get Visual Studio working in Linux.
There should be no XBox, there should be no Windows Phone, and LAMP developers should be using Visual Studio instead of vim.
Instead they decided if a piece of hardware wasn't running Windows, they had to build their own hardware and compete in a crowded marketplace instead of using their dominance to own said markets.
I'm not sure how much damage being able to use computers without Microsoft Office by itself has done to people's perception of Microsoft. I'm more convinced that having, for the first time since the days of Amigas and AppleII's, major competing computer platforms has really dislodged the pre-eminence of the company in popular conception.
Apple preemptively cut off the Idevice from office by building the app store and taking a 30% cut of sales. MS would have been stupid to give away 30% of its revenue to its biggest competitor, but in hindsight it may have been the right move.
>"To my clients, Microsoft Office was a “must have” no matter how much I tried to convince them otherwise. And I tried very hard for a while before even I just finally gave up. If a client told me they had to have it I just nodded along and told them what to get and where. They were as sure as the sun rises that, without Office, they would not be able to work, open attachments, write letters, anything. They had to have it."
The author's wife convinced him, not all those clients...given the different considerations entailed, I would say that the easier of the two is done.
This article would make sense if Microsoft Office was Microsoft's ONLY product. But isn't it obvious why they haven't developed serviceable clones of Office for other platforms? They are selling the platform. Office, more than any other factor, has driven the market leadership of Windows for two and a half decades; and Windows in turn has driven the market leadership of Office. That's the Microsoft catch-22: they can't change anything about this relationship, because changing even one detail means losing market share.
No, I think he was right - "build platform specific and complementary versions of Office for every device that popped up." People moving to iPads would likely just install Office since it's what they know and less work learning something new.
Don't really get the wife's big miss - "allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done." How is that a miss? They missed stopping people from realizing they don't need Office? Not sure how that would be done.
I keep seeing comments here about whether-or-not consumers are using their iPhones and iPads to do word processing and spreadsheets. And I think that argument misses the point that the article was trying to make. I think the conclusion was that we don't need spreadsheets and word processors at all. There are a lot of tools out there that help you "get business done" that are not focused around typing a document or generating a chart. I get business done by using Freshbooks and Balsamiq Mock-ups.
Owning iPhone/iPad/Android does not imply "getting work done". Work can be done with or without Microsoft Office and with or without iPhone/iPad/Android.
Google Docs (and Zoho) does collaboration really well. This is important. MS Office does not even come close.
The article makes a valid point - we do not need bloated desktop software to produce documents. Some of the people already realized this - the question is how long it will take for most of the people to realize this.
No way guy! I use OpenOffice religiously and it works for me! The problem is marketing.....I can't tell you how many people I have to explain OF to. Everyone only seems to know MS because they marketed better, that's all.
I must disagree with everyone. MS's downfall was not the Wizard of OZ style problem. The problem is investments. You see any good investor will tell you the same thing: DIVERSIFY YOUR PORTFOLIO. Sure if I invested into google day 1, I'd be rich. If I bought Apple stock when it was $80 a pop, I'd be rich. Etc. HOWEVER knowing that a-priori is impossible, so you diversify.
If you think Microsoft, what do you think?
> Microsoft Windows
> Microsoft Office
> Internet Explorer
> .Net
Let's tackle them:
Internet Explorer -- Use windows. It only works on windows. If you leave windows your browser is no longer available. Originally intended to make even the web work on windows only. Basically Macs were crippled to all hell. Counters -> Firefox, Safari, Chrome are all cross platform, most people who use that suffer nothing switching.
.Net -- Its Objective-C for windows. There are more uses for it, yes, like writing servers as an alternative to java, except they work on windows. End of the day it serves the same purpose.
Windows -- The flagship product. This is what MS wants you to use, and on your server, because this makes MS money. The problem is that MS makes zero dollars from a computer that can run Windows. It makes money on windows. Piracy is a real problem. If I was to install a pirated windows on a computer, MS is quite furious for good reasons. Compare that to Apple who will give you a copy of OSX if you ask them really nicely, and does NOTHING to prevent piracy. The only thing they care is that it runs on Apple hardware. More later.
Office -- The other flagship product. They convince businesses that sharing information is only possible with this. Period. As Google Docs, LibreOffice, Confluence, Basecamp, etc start to become more and more popular, the office stronghold is being chipped away brick by brick, and MS can't lay bricks fast enough to counter.
Let's compare that to Apple's model:
iTunes -- Initially shipped with DRM to prevent using anything other than iPods to play music. By the time they removed DRM it didn't matter, iPods were here to stay.
App Store -- You can only run the apps on iPhone/iPod/iPad/OSX
OSX -- If it's pirated, who cares, it only runs on Apple hardware.
Garage Band -- Eh, its cheap. Whatever, use it if you like. Its OSX only so we'll give it practically for free.
Safari -- Runs on windows and mac. They don't care about linux. Just to get people used to the "mac way"
You're completely missing the enterprise side of the equation, which is still a booming part of MSFTs business right now. And they are still a goliath in Enterprise (Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc).
You also speak of their 'downfall' in the past tense, as if it's already happened. They still push 90% of desktop market share, rule enterprise, rule the Office suite business, and have some nifty things going on in the entertainment side (not profitable, but nifty nonetheless).
you don't need _anything_ except for your brain to get work done. Everything else you use is just a luxury, MS office being just one that most people take for granted these days.
Can anyone guess how much percentage of spreadsheets, documents etc. are actually created on smartphones and tablets versus PCs and Macs? I would put that in the low single digits.
How long does it take and how much does it cost them make a version of Office? Maybe they already have it in progress. They have been recently releasing apps for iOS and Android.
Interesting, people have been predicting the end of MS anytime soon since more than a decade on Slashdot. Meanwhile, they keep getting record profits. This is nothing but feel good linkbait for the Apple fans to lap up.
Meanwhile, the face that they released OneNote for Android and iOS is totally lost in the brouhaha.
After all, this is a site where Gruber and Sieger get top billing but Paul Thurrotts Winsupersite is shadowbanned totally from even appearing on the site, probably due to sensitive fans' excessive flagging.
If the tables were turned, we would be hearing endlessly about how Microsoft takes 75% of the web server profits, even if Apache and nginx are ahead in marketshare.
"This is nothing but feel good linkbait for the Apple fans to lap up."
"After all, this is a site where Gruber and Sieger get top billing but Paul Thurrotts Winsupersite is shadowbanned totally from even appearing on the site, probably due to sensitive fans' excessive flagging."
Those are not substantial critiques, those are insults. Those are bad contributions to the discourse here and make you look like an asshole.
"They have been recently releasing apps for iOS and Android ... they released OneNote for Android and iOS"
I tried OneNote in university and I just didn't "get it". Can someone explain?
I have 2 use cases for notes - short term stuff I need in the next day and longer term notes I might need for 6 months+. The first I used to do with something like the "stickies" applet in Linux - eventually I found those to be too much trouble to maintain/delete and moved to a paper notebook. The latter case I keep in plain text files. When I tried OneNote it seemed to have a horribly complicated interface and I didn't understand what it added to the equation.
I think One Note lets you easily¹ import content from websites, documents, etc. into a note, and then lets you store notes in pages, so you could e.g. have a page about a topic you're researching with some articles, a diagram, some handwritten notes, etc.
I just use textfiles and directories, though.
¹ I think it adds a global keyboard shortcut to launch the tool.
Maybe the release of OneNote has been lost, but does anyone really care about it? I think I had it installed as part of Office the whole time I was at my previous job but never ever used it for anything. Word and Excel may or may not be important, but I doubt there can be many people who would ditch Office completely except for OneNote.
Easy there tiger! None of what you mentioned is dedicated note taking apps, though they of course might be used for the purpose.
The "I don't know anyone who use is so it doesn't exist" argument doesn't really hold. The only time I've heard of anyone using Vim was 12 years ago. That was a guy with very long, very dark hair who didn't talk much.
Does this mean Vim is not widely used? Of course not. It just means I don't work with people using Vim.
Look around the web for OneNote resources, I'm sure you'll find plenty.
this is okay, except for one thing: the iOS stuff is for playing, and nobody ever gets anything done. How many angel and VC deals of the past 2-3 involved an Excel spreadsheet at one point?
Now, how many do you think involved a spreadsheet-type app on android or iOS.
I bet you even the guys who raised a round to build a spreadsheet app (not thinking of anyone in particular) did so flinging excel sheets back and forth.
Hell, you don't even see apple dogfooding any excel replacements. There just isn't any dogfood there. Tim Cook uses excel for Mac. And in the evenings, uses the iPad for entertaintment or light email.
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
Is there honestly any real competition in that field from tablets and iStuff and the like? No. Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but work is done on a desktop, where you need to do a lot of typing and clicking. The interface is simply better for that.
Moreover, Microsoft Office has pretty much nailed its niche: I challenge you to find a better office suite. Here's what you'll have to do:
1. Find me an office suite that works out-of-the-box.
2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email, database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet, simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
3. Find me an office suite that does (2) fairly well.
4. Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
There's some nifty stuff on the net as thin clients running in HTML5. There's some cool stuff happening in tablets. But the author is sorely mistaken in presuming that the world has somehow moved past Office.
EDIT: And yes, I've tried Google Docs and OpenOffice and WordPerfect and all these things--but for raw "get the bidness done" Office is pretty much it.
EDIT2: And Word's spellchecker could've saved me. >:(