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Microsoft Bashes Apple's iWork Software, New iPads

IJ Reilly said:
I haven't seen the new iWork UI yet but since I heard the same "dumbed down" criticism of every other version, I take it with a very tiny grain of salt.

I'm sorry if you like things more complicated. Most people don't.
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No, I like things to be a useable level. I have the new iWork, I somewhat like the way it looks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to say it was a masterfully done UI. And when I say dumbed down, that's what iWork has always been in comparison. Office has some features that just make everything easier for people.

There's nothing wrong with it being dumbed down, though. Don't take that as being the insult that most see it as. I think iWork needs to have a bit more while Office's UI needs to be dumbed down a little.
 
blesscheese said:
.I think this is the beginning of the end of the M$ business model...
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Microsoft has seen this coming for awhile. Google and Apple changed the way Microsoft does business. We are only now seeing that fact as Microsoft transitions into a devices and services company rather than just a software company.
 
PinkyMacGodess said:
And I have, over the year, had to deal with so many Word documents that self destructed after a certain point. It has gotten better, but the 'good old days' were filled with 'blown' Word documents that you either couldn't open anymore, or they just freaked out during editing or saving them.

I LOVED telling people that it 'just happens' from time to time, and for 'complex' documents. The next question was 'what does complex mean? What did I do to make this happen?' And I couldn't tell them... I loved the crap out of that part...
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My complaint about Word is that it turns sophisticated technology into a typewriter. Again, judging by the Word documents that cross my desk, very, very few people come anywhere close to mastering even its most basic features, let alone, the multitudinous features that its most enthusiastic proponents think are so vital.
 
MS have been successful until now in convincing everyone that they need Office.

If office is so good and essential, they don't need to worry about these young whippersnappers snapping at their heels, people will use iWork, find it wanting and still buy Office.

The trouble will start when people use iWork, OpenOffice etc and find it suits their needs for a simple word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool.

If students start using these apps for their projects and degree courses, a whole new generation will grow up without using MS Office. After all, why spend even the discounted cost for student versions if they can get free equivalents. That's when the market really will start getting shaken up.
 
Smart move on Apple's part

Excellent marketing comping iWork. So many people think they " need" Office. If the same people tried iWork it would meet needs and with less annoyance.

People who actually do need Office will use it. Not really an issue if the need is there.
 
john123 said:
Then you're in for a lot of surprise. Just because you've not worked in an industry where a real spreadsheet is used doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That's tantamount to proclaiming the Earth is flat just because you haven't been in orbit to see that it's spherical.
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I had a client that went with Open Office and didn't miss Excel at all...

Excel, Word, and PowerPoint are bloated behemoths that thunder with their weight and feature list. They are like the guy who came up with a nuclear powered can opener. Um, the vast majority of people just want to open one or two cans and don't really need that much bloat, or user abusive overhead.

There are so many 'features' and 'capabilities' in Word that probably less than 10% of its users would ever need them, or be able to figure out how to use them...
 
Gasu E. said:
I am working now in a very large enterprise on my corporate PC running Outlook and Office. Outlook is just horrible-- slow, with terrible functionality. It takes me 15 minutes to get it going in the morning. If I want to change from mail to my calendar, that's 45 seconds. Using it remotely from home on my PC is a nightmare, although that is more an Exchange problem. Searching is far more limited than what I was doing with corporate systems in the '80s. Managing mail is primitive and terrible. Yes, I'm sure the performance problems have a lot to do with my company centralizing, deduplicating, replicating, doing security stuff and whatever; but that's the reality of the enterprise environment today, which is supposedly MS's strength.

Office is not terrible, but is just complicated bloatware. Excel is pretty good, actually; but I find it exceedingly hard to figure out how to move beyond the basics in the other apps. I use to be more expert at Word and Powerpoint years ago, but MS figured out how to make my favorite advanced features difficult and obscure.
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I have the complete opposite experience. I am one of the few Apple guys in my company, which is a Microsoft everything company. I tried using Mail and Calendar on my Mac Pro at work for all my needs, but it is just way to under featured and weak compared to the full Outlook client. I just wasn't able to efficiently get work done. Not to mention I had to use Sharepoint. Pages and Numbers also just wasn't cutting it, especially for the Excel work.

I run Office 2011 for Mac and it runs a lot better for me. I also have a PC that has Office 2013 and that is even snappier. Everything is smooth as silk on my experience. Then again, being in IT, I get to pick the latest and greatest hardware for myself.

For those of you that say Exchange sucks, what else is an international global (Fortune 100) company suppose to use? Novell? Google Apps? Lotus Notes (lol)?
 
Microsoft has a point the surface is better for getting work done. To argue with that is insane. At the same time Apple has taken a step in the right direction getting its own work suite upgraded and out to more users.
 
"The good news is that Microsoft understands how people work better than anyone else on the planet."

on reading this, I laughed out loud like I haven't for months

Actually, i've found Numbers is so much easier than excel to use - I've been doing work on numbers for a while now and I haven't really missed excel. I got the new version yesterday and it is true the interface looks extremely simplified, but I'll see about the substance very soon. I can understand apple's approach to make iWork work across macos and ios, but I'm a little worried about how the changes may have affected the desktop version
 
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SusanK said:
Excellent marketing comping iWork. So many people think they " need" Office. If the same people tried iWork it would meet needs and with less annoyance.

People who actually do need Office will use it. Not really an issue if the need is there.
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Yeah, most people don't actually need Office. It's a tool for people who do professional work. Most people can make due with a smaller, simpler, suite. Microsoft needs to make sure they cater to the real Office users ... corporations.
 
aerok said:
Doesn't really matter if it's better, I haven't met a single College professor that accepted .pages documents. Nor have I been requested to send an iWork documents working in 2 different important international corporations.
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Then export it as a Word file, if that matters. Or give them a PDF, which is the way work product should be presented anyway, assuming you care how it looks.

What I use internally to create my documents should not matter to anyone except me. All I care about is the final work product. I call that productivity, at least as it should be defined.
 
- The Surface and Surface 2 are less expensive than the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively, and yet offer more storage, both onboard and in the cloud.
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Isn't this right out just a lie? At least in Norway the iPad Air with 128GB of storage is 6490 NOK and Surface 2 is 7990 NOK.
 
WSFrazier said:
I have the complete opposite experience. I am one of the few Apple guys in my company, which is a Microsoft everything company. I tried using Mail and Calendar on my Mac Pro at work for all my needs, but it is just way to under featured and weak compared to the full Outlook client. I just wasn't able to efficiently get work done. Not to mention I had to use Sharepoint. Pages and Numbers also just wasn't cutting it, especially for the Excel work.

I run Office 2011 for Mac and it runs a lot better for me. I also have a PC that has Office 2013 and that is even snappier. Everything is smooth as silk on my experience. Then again, being in IT, I get to pick the latest and greatest hardware for myself.

For those of you that say Exchange sucks, what else is an international global (Fortune 100) company suppose to use? Novell? Google Apps? Lotus Notes (lol)?
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I actually migrated my whole college from office to google apps and that was about 3 years ago (if you think google apps is underpowered now try them 3 years ago). Seems to work for the students and staff but a fortune 100 company? I am sure there are some out there but not many that use google apps.
 
He was addressing productivity and, like it or not, an iOS does not lend itself to being a business productivity tool when I can't do something as basic as attaching a document to an email reply without a workaround.

iOS does a lot of good, but it is no replacement for business productivity tool.
 
aerok said:
As much as I hate Office, I only lost 1 documents in 3 years using it every day at work.

Office was not the problem with you, it was your PC (Or MAC)
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No, usually it was someone that 'used' Word or Excel.

Using multiple pages in Excel and linking them to other files could cause Excel to either detonate, or make a file that couldn't be opened or saved. It happened repeatedly to one client of ours. We ended up updating their machine, and having them split the pages into separate files rather than doing it all in one file. It wasn't how they wanted to do things, but it solved the issue for most of the users.

There was something about opening these files and saving them over and over. Eventually they got 'weird' and would start freaking out.

It really happened...
 
IJ Reilly said:
Then export it as a Word file, if that matters. Or give them a PDF, which is the way work product should be presented anyway, assuming you care how it looks.

What I use internally to create my documents should not matter to anyone except me. All I care about is the final work product. I call that productivity, at least as it should be defined.
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Of course, then you have to worry about compatibility problems sometimes. Just because a suite puts out into .docx doesn't mean it won't have compatibility issues. I've turned in things from OO and LO that later got sent back to me because it didn't open right on their Office version.
 
I do believe Apple can improve on its productivity feature set in iOS such as split screen apps, having access to a file system and etc. Though the Surface just doesn't have the ecosystem and support that the iPad has. What I find concerning was that Windows 8.1 apparently bricked some Windows Surface RT tablets when it came out. I can understand bricking third party manufacturers devices but your own with your own software?
 
Everyone talks about everything but no one talk about M$ Surface Pro 2 - Kickstand !
OK everyone, look on the back of Microsoft tablet there is a kickstand...not an ordinary kickstand but an updated kickstand now this may not look much but I think this is big...it may be big then Window 8.1 :D
 
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