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.
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.