The Office Web Apps, as they were called before, have been free ever since they were released in 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Web_Apps). They've just always been somewhat hidden inside Skydrive (which has also now been rebranded as Onedrive).
This is nothing new, per se, just a launcher page that lets you directly access each of the web apps instead of having to launch the apps from inside Skydrive's file explorer.
Is this a (belated) reaction to Google Docs being "good enough" for many use cases?
We also just heard about Chrome OS pushing Microsoft to cut the price of Windows licenses for low-end laptops. Plus we have Nokia (soon to be Microsoft's smartphone division) releasing low-end handsets based on Android.
These may all be reasonable strategic choices (I tend to think they're at least heading in the right direction), but put the picture together and it looks like Microsoft has been pushed into playing Google's game according to Google's rules. That usually doesn't end well.
I think they're starting to understand the pursuit of singularity and think (for good reason) that they have enough connections/money/data in the bag to reach for it. Google disclosed their pursuit for the first time in my knowledge recently on ACM. It would be an interesting read, their privacy policy, and whether they "collect information to enhance their service". Also the business intelligence is worth it's weight in gold.
In proper MS marketing form I think there is a difference in two very similar products (and their names don't help the consumer at all). Office online is a web-based version of these popular apps (1:1 parity of OS software? I am not sure). There is also a $99 subscription model that allows you to install these apps for 5 computers (local OS software installs) + the benefits of these web apps + X gigs of One/Sky Drive + some Skype stuff.
I have been a happy subscriber to the $99 version (with OS apps) and I have been very happy with the price point. Have pretty much moved over to OneNote from EverNote over the past year and also love the ability to have a local install of Excel, but be able to edit inline on the web when needed.
The online apps don’t have 1:1 parity with the desktop software. For example, Word Online doesn’t allow creation of custom Styles, and Excel Online doesn’t support Pivot Tables.
I can almost use this on my phone...but since I can not paste my highly randomized password, from my password database, into their website. Why not? I don't know, I think paste is disabled by Javascript. Who the hell would think that is a good idea?
I can't stand it when sites do that (blocking paste) but I don't think that is what's happening here. It's just their placeholder text "Password" that is messing things up. Try long-pressing just on the left of the 'P' of the placeholder. That worked for me after a few tries (on Android).
Which phone were you using? I don't think this is actually on purpose, but I just tried it on my iPhone and did find that it was inconsistent and difficult to paste a password. I am going to send some emails and see if we can figure out the issue. Let me know what kind of phone you are on.
But, according to Microsoft if Microsoft Office is not explicitly installed on the machine then it's "just a brick"! [1]
And when you use it, Microsoft will be able to track what you do, just like Google does! And we all know that those big bad corporations just can't be trusted. Except for Microsoft, of course.
Was it not already? I've been using the online version of Office built into skydrive for more than a year now without a purchased copy of office. I think this is more of a renaming than a new offering.
OneNote is awesome. I'd use it more, but I can't figure out a way to encrypt it while still getting sync. If they offered some built-in password protection, so that the contents were safely encrypted on-device and the hosting aspect just sync'd blobs, hey, awesome.
They could even implement a differential update mechanism, just encrypt the deltas before uploading. (After careful review, since that might introduce some sort of crypto weakness.) I'd even be satisfied if some of the metadata wasn't encrypted.
Otherwise, I don't feel comfortable in having a detailed, personal, life journal. I want something I could access from various devices and record internal thoughts, while minimizing the possibility of anyone including close friends, getting access.
OneNotes default appears to be "hey, we'll drop this, unencrypted, in your Live sign-in default storage".
It is Bitlocker'd, plus EFS'd (just in case my TPM gives up the keys - it's unclear if the password is mixed in to derive key material or not). And I'm getting a new SSD with "Encrypted Drive" support, so the keys are never in-memory (although again, I don't know if the key is just sitting in an easily-accessible chip on the disk, or if my password combines for key material).
And then EFS on top of that, and each VM has its own encryption as well. So even a full compromise won't hurt the VMs I'm not using at the time.
But it doesn't help since OneNote's online slick-access-from-anywhere, doesn't do crypto AFAIK. So all my transparent crypto protect my local device, but OneLook uploads the notebooks unencrypted to SkyDrive.
Not particularly. Anything really secret I probably wouldn't put on that computer. I just don't see why other people should be allowed to access my data.
The biggest win, I think is the internal "e drive" encryption, so that a RAM dump doesn't spill keys. That even somewhat mitigates Lightning DMA attacks. (Although the attacker could just hijack the OS at that point.)
Does anyone know how they have implemented it? Looking at the page source there is lots of javascript involved, as you would expect. Are they using the DOM or a Canvas that fills the screen?
If you look at the network traffic it's very odd -- not only are the formulas being evaluated on the server, the server is shipping back DOM strings, not values. So it appears they are doing rendering on the server as well as calculation.
They should make Office free. These days, more and more non-techie friends are starting to use OpenOffice on their own. While OO quality is no where near Microsoft Office's, OO writer and Powerpoint are good enough for simple usage. And people, don't make fancy PP anymore. They just need something that can read ppt and something they can play.
They make so much money off office. We buy licenses for almost every person at the company just because there's no equivalent to excel. Only windows boxes in our office are the finance guys who can't adapt to excel on the Mac.
Make it free for home/educational/personal use then, with liberal definitions of those terms, and keep on charging enterprises. Enterprise licensing is where the money is for a product like Office anyway, and those customers actually prefer having to pay for something over getting the same thing for free.
Meanwhile, all those people using the free version will be churning out lots of documents in Office file formats, adding to the value of having a copy of Office around. That in turn makes it more attractive to paying customers.
If the employer gives each employee a chromebook instead of a desktop, and tell each employee to get Office on their own, then the employer doesn't have to pay license fee for every employee. I imagine this can reduce the operation cost by a lot.
How so? I can carry my laptop to my office and use my laptop instead. When I come home I get paged and my boss wants me to read a document. i wouldn't go back to my office just to open a document, would I? If I work for my dad's deli and I need to help him print a price tag I would be "working" for my dad and using my personal Office would violate the policy - but who would pay for a copy? I am self-employed and I use Office at home for both school, self-employed work and for personal use. Personal use is a very grey area - hence why personal edition has missing features.
The service/software may not be used for commercial,
non-profit, or revenue-generating activities.
While EULA do not always hold up in court I can't see a reason why this wouldn't hold up. What you should do is VPN into work to do something for your boss. Or even better have a enterprise licensed version on your laptop. Yes you are violating the policy when you work for your dad. Your example of a single, small user violating the EULA is far different than a corporation actively encouraging users to violate the EULA. You may not be worth suing but a company sure is.
Big companies still need the Office/Exchange combo and will pay handsomely for it. Maybe we'll see a decent consumer version for free, but Office in general will always be a major chunk of MSFT's revenue.
Add in Lync. After seeing a demo and getting our small office on Lync, I can't imagine going back to other crappy PBXes and their version of "Unified" communications/messaging. Most of them thing adding a toolbar to Outlook means it's a solved problem.
Being able to screen share, conference call, regular calling/transferring/etc. in addition to secure IM and all that - it's really slick.
I'm going to admit up front I'm probably hopelessly out of touch.
I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I can't figure out why most people would need Office today. Like I said I'm out of touch but...
If I write docs for publication it's HTML.
If I write for correspondence it's email
If I write for product design it's probably a wiki. Something the entire team can edit.
I am in no way suggesting that people don't have legit uses for Office or OpenOffice. I am saying that I have not had a legit use for Office in 6+ years.
Those few times I need to make a sign for party or a few page letter Google docs works fine. Even presentations I've done in Google docs just fine. Spreadsheets work fine as well. They can even be scripted if you want to do crazy stuff.
Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed?
Especially the Hacker News crowd. Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?
Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed?
Much larger feature set.
Privacy.
Robustness and future-proofing.
Shall we go on?
Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?
Sure. I've never used word processors much for professional work, as I find different tools of one kind or another are usually a better choice for preparing any given documentation. But there is more to office suites than word processors. Spreadsheets, in particular, are still the most convenient tool for many administrative tasks.
I always find gnumeric to be plenty powerful for doing any spreadsheet stuffs I need to do. No I don't get fancy, just mess with columns and formulae and statistical analysis.
I use (Mac) Excel for a niche but handy purpose: as an editor tool for the game I'm building. Tabular data files for my game are stored in the (easily parsed) Excel 2004 XML format. There aren't really any similar, generalizable tools that are more modder-friendly and I'm not going to sit there writing YAML/JSON/XML to fill in stuff like "this wooden sword costs 10 coins" because there are vastly better things to be doing with my time.
I could use LibreOffice, as it supports Excel 2004 XML files, but Office is cheap enough and LibreOffice annoying enough that it's worth my time to just use the real thing rather than run the risk of a psychotic, gouge-my-eyes-out break from the still-horrible-in-2014 LibreOffice UX.
I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one.
If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.
And Excel requires a save step. It also requires manually making sure 2 people don't edit the excel file because git won't be able to merge that changes. Google spreadsheets won't have that problem.
Maybe it's just me. Google Docs seems hard to work with, espeically for someone who grew up with MS Office :( I give it a try a lot, but I still can't do everything I want with Google Docs. On the other hands, MS Office online is more complete (well, no duh)...
and it isn't so much about privacy for me though. I am not a journalist; I don't have sensitive information I need to hide from others.
For what purpose? I've used Excel in the past for developer things but with Google Docs everyone can edit at the same time. I've used that feature as well which AFAIK I don't get with Excel or Open Office.
The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one.
Some of the Microsoft Office suite have collaboration features (OneNote is good for this in my experience) I'm not sure about Excel
As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad
Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping
Those features are all available on spreadsheets in google docs. I use google docs as a mathematical scratch pad all the time. It also does graphs and it can be scripted in JavaScript. One of my friends wrote a script that downloads all the latest stock data every few minutes and does a bunch of analysis on it.
Yeah, right. Office is MS cash cow. If they charged a reasonable amount for monthly use, that would be good. Lets say, 1 dollar per month. 3 dollar for 4 users family pack. That would be great.
In an efficient market, in the long run, the price of a unit of software would approach the marginal cost of a unit of software.
I wonder how long it will be until essentially all software is free, and all the services are run more or less at cost (as the economists would put it, they can earn profits, just not economic profits). But in the long run, as they say, we're all dead ;)
That's only true in cases of perfect competition, which mainly obtains for commodities. Products with different features are examples of monopolistic competition, because different products are not automatic substitutes for each other.
I think you misunderstand a little. That's not the consequence of an efficient market, that's the definition of an efficient market. ANY market where the price of an item is higher than its marginal cost is an inefficient one. (The cost includes opportunity cost, though, so it's not like the widget factory needs to make zero accounting profit on the operation).
It's quite probable, of course, that software in the general case is prone to market inefficiencies, especially in the short run: there are high fixed costs associated with producing software. Yet extant software is so stupidly easy to copy that it's unthinkable that, thousands of years hence, things like WORD PROCESSORS will have a good reason for costing money. So how long will it take to get there?
Well I've never really liked the new UI paradigm in Office 2007 and beyond: it's just very messy to do even simple things. With LibreOffice there are certainly some UI issues as well, but it's closer to Office 2003 in terms of how things are organized.
I'll just say that design quality of presentations, especially for startups who need credibility, is extremely important. Powerpoint- while it doesn't do it for you- is the easiest way to look credible without doing all of your slides in Adobe software.
For internal company presentations, perhaps it doesn't make sense to do fancy powerpoints. But if you can't make a presentation that looks credible, it betrays confidence in your ability to deliver on a product/service that is legitimate.
This is great news for GNU+Linux users, I'm always so hesitant when installing libreoffice to my computer and use google drive when veiwing ppt files. In my opinion Microsoft office online loads ppt files a lot faster, which is nice. You also don't have to go full screen to view all the animations. Cool.
I just wish the Tasks/To-do portion of Outlook.com/Live Calendar would sync to anything on a Windows 8 desktop.
My girlfriend has a WP8 phone and a Windows 8 laptop, and uses Live for all her PIM stuff -- but there isn't any way to get Live Calendar tasks/to-dos on her desktop. It works on her phone though, so go figure, and it also works in the web app.
This is what frustrates me with Microsoft. They have cool features and neat applications, and the new integration across devices is awesome... but they miss these little details, and that ruins the experience quite a bit :(
Will it save my documents in a compatible format to Office 2013? I've had Excel documents go corrupt or unreadable on Excel desktop app. As much as I use Excel at work and home, I'm staying away from their online thing with most of my work. Been burnt enough
You can save an Excel document in Excel and immediately re-open it and have Excel complain the document is corrupted. It's happened to me dozens of times (back when I was required to do Excel development a couple years ago... it was like a flashback to 1990).
Anyhow, every time it happened, there was no apparent damage to the document. I think this stems from Microsoft having to be insanely aggressive in defending against their own bugs.
Loving it, the stuff(Word/Excel) is ultra-fast, and aside from AMD, doesnt seem to be using any bloated js framework. Looks more like it's optimized to the max, with raw DOM manipulations.
I use Sky/One drive primarily for work. The Excel app is pretty decent but the Word app blows. If you don't have Word installed, your feature choices can be pretty limited.
Someone just skyped me and the office.com tab is now flashing with their name in my browser. I'm not sure how to acknowledge the notification or read the message - any ideas?
It's Tuesday night, it's late in SF. Still at the office. I felt MS Office Online should have been free from the start. So having a bit of fun, no need to be serious and write 5 paragraph comments analyzing the news, how you feel about the news, and how it impacts the industry. Sometimes being cliché is exactly what is in order.
Jokes on HN are strongly discouraged. As much as people like them, their presence creates a feedback loop that drives the noise-to-signal ratio through the roof. Jokes can be made, understood and voted up very quickly. In a democratic situation like HN, this leads to a large volume of replies and up votes that quickly drowns out all relevant conversation. The more threads that feature jokes, the harder it becomes to discourage them in the future. It seems the fate of all vote-based forums to eventually devolve into a sea of memes (HN -> Reddit -> Digg). HN's anti-humor downvote brigade gets a lot of pushback, but they are so harsh because they are doing their best to hold back that tide.
I feel like it is very unlikely that any of the documents saved on this service will ever be of interest to the NSA so I would guess this would just add more noise
The Russian people thought similarly in the 1920s about their letters and conversations - until in the dark of the night family members were dragged from their beds and deported to the Siberian tundras to die.
