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Microsoft Brings 'Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers' to iPhone

Let's just talk about the product...

Hey there,
Signed up for Microsoft 365. Got Mac 2011. very happy with it.
That's all I'll say about the ranting and raving about pricing models and such, which, by the way, is not what I am interested about.

What I am interested in is why Office Mobile (what the article is about) is so anemic. Really, Office Mobile for Word isn't much more than a basic txt editor and Excel for Office Mobile can't handle any sheet that is being used by a power user.

Really, Numbers and Pages (so, far) are WAY more powerful than Microsoft's own offerings in the mobile space.

I've been using it for the past coupe of hours and am confused by the lack of work that can actually be done on it.

Many will argue that an iPhone is not meant to be a major editing area. I would agree. Not very conducive to a lot of work. But, if it's the only device i have on me and I get a request to change something on an Excel sheet....I'd like to be able to do that.

I mean, even the SkyDrive website on the iPad gives you more ability to edit (even though it can't handle the Excel sheets I use for accounting purposes), but that also requires web connectivity.

So, really, until Microsoft makes a powerful Mobile Office version, I will have to use iWork or other third party office editors.
 
subsonix said:
It doesn't.
Click to expand...
iOS in Enterprise is great for consumption but if you want to "create" in Apple's walled garden alongside the kiddies, it pretty much sucks. At the end of the day, you're still pulling out laptops/ultrabooks to do the real work.

My setup will continue to be a smartphone for pocketable consumption and a device that can still do *everything* while remaining somewhat portable. (i.e., not the iPad). Every January it's the same thing at my office. People show up with new Xmas iPads. By March most are back to laptops or even paper calendars, relying on their phones for the rest.

That said, there are indeed more consumers than enterprise users so at least Apple doesn't pretend to serve both. Third parties are trying but there are just too many hoops it seems.
 
Too bad Office is pretty much irrelevant these days. Folks, there are plenty of alternatives, even for the enterprise. I doubt this move will help them gain any market share. It just shows they are grasping for air while drowning in their own cool-aid. (Go Live Tiles!)
 
subsonix said:
Office is widespread no doubt but it's also dull corporate bloatware.

Image
Click to expand...

Have you ever even used Office? It's not bloat ware, at all. And it's not just corporate users, it's the most popular in the education and home market. Why? It just works, and it's easily the best.

And dull? It's for getting work done and bring productive, not playing angry birds

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beautifulcoder said:
Too bad Office is pretty much irrelevant these days. Folks, there are plenty of alternatives, even for the enterprise. I doubt this move will help them gain any market share. It just shows they are grasping for air while drowning in their own cool-aid. (Go Live Tiles!)
Click to expand...

If its so irrelevant then why does it have over a billion users and 90%+ market share?

Why hasn't any other office suite been successful?
 
Krazy Bill said:
iOS in Enterprise is great for consumption but if you want to "create" in Apple's walled garden alongside the kiddies, it pretty much sucks. At the end of the day, you're still pulling out laptops/ultrabooks to do the real work.
Click to expand...

Yes you use laptops or desktops to create office documents, I agree, that's my point! Which is why a standalone version is not critical to iOS success in enterprise where it already is very successful, which is what you claimed. So we seems to be in agreement.

The addition of this Office365 app is a great addition since you can view and edit your documents on the move.
 
Amazing Iceman said:
For the year is $ 99.99.

For that much money you could buy the iWork suite for both your iPad and Mac, and never pay again.

What you would pay for 2.5 years is equal to the cost of Final Cut Pro X.

Also, consider the fact that you'll need to be connected to Skydrive, which requires an internet connection.
Click to expand...

What you fail to include in your statements is that there is value in the Office 365 subscription for those that have a mixed Windows and OS X environment, and that this value is further extended for those that also have to have (for whatever reason) the latest version of Office on almost the day it is released. For those environments, the subscription model is very cost effective.

For people like me, I'm not a fan of it. I don't like subscription-based products, and most likely probably never will. However, I do get why Microsoft (and other companies) are starting to move to them. I just hope that they don't discontinue the individual perpetual licensed versions. Unfortunately, they probably will. We've even had a brief taste of Microsoft's attitude towards that when Office 2013 was first released. It was only after an outcry from customers and blogs that Microsoft did a 180 on their initial decision, and changed their licensing terms. Still, it gives one an idea of where things are headed long term, and it's not pretty for me.
 
Amazing Iceman said:
For the year is $ 99.99.

For that much money you could buy the iWork suite for both your iPad and Mac, and never pay again.

What you would pay for 2.5 years is equal to the cost of Final Cut Pro X.

Also, consider the fact that you'll need to be connected to Skydrive, which requires an internet connection.
Click to expand...

Ridiculous. If anything, Office should be the cheap option.
 
beautifulcoder said:
Too bad Office is pretty much irrelevant these days. Folks, there are plenty of alternatives, even for the enterprise. I doubt this move will help them gain any market share. It just shows they are grasping for air while drowning in their own cool-aid. (Go Live Tiles!)
Click to expand...

You obviously do not work in the business world if you think office is irrelevant.
 
G51989 said:
Why should Office be the cheap option? It's a far more capable product than Apples alternatives, and it's cross platform.
Click to expand...

Because it's sold in way larger numbers and crashes a lot. The only thing more capable on it is Excel, but PowerPoint is still terrible, and Word is just OK if you ignore the startup time and instability.
 
Ccrew said:
$99 per year for 5 computers is a far cry less than buying the software as a package on a every two or three year cycle as Office tends to be released for those same 5 computers. At $99 a year you always have the latest version. When you do the math, yes you are locked into a subscription model, but at the end of the day if you're a heavy Office user that upgrades on the release curve it's cheaper.
Click to expand...

Why update when 2004 and 2008 are the best versions, and the new ones aren't getting better? I don't even upgrade my iWork, and that's the one I actually use.
 
beautifulcoder said:
Actually, I'm trying to convince my customers of what a horrid piece of awful crap office actually is. Again, plenty of good alternatives.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but the reality is that office is not going anywhere. I have tried alternatives and if the document is anything but just plain text, formatting can be an issue. There is no way around it unless everyone you deal with uses something else.
 
tdar said:
Remember you can set your default search engine on both the iPhone and the Mac to Bing as I have done years ago.

Apple and Microsoft have always been "friends". It's Google that threatens both of them, and who will have to be destroyed if they are to survive. Yes it's that dire.
Click to expand...

Are you trying to push your own stock or something? The Bing search is ridiculously bloated. It's like Yahoo only with better design. So you're choosing Bing just because Google is Apple's competitor now? I wouldn't use Bing if they paid me.

They somehow got into my Facebook account and brought up my picture and "social results" even though this is the first time I've visited Bing.com on this machine, and I opened this account very recently. I'm guessing that Facebook gave my information to Microsoft (but I don't actually have very much). Not cool.
 
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beautifulcoder said:
Actually, I'm trying to convince my customers of what a horrid piece of awful crap office actually is. Again, plenty of good alternatives.
Click to expand...

Besides iWork, what is there? I tried OpenOffice, and it was even worse. I'm satisfied with iWork except that Numbers lacks some features that I sometimes need... and the OpenOffice knockoff of Excel is horrible.
 
subsonix said:
Office is widespread no doubt but it's also dull corporate bloatware.

Image
Click to expand...

You're joking right? For me, Office is the best just for Word. Pages just doesn't come close to some of the fantastic proofing and cloud features Word offers. Pages also seems terrible at handling large documents, especially when autosave freezes the app momentarily every five mins.
 
donutbagel said:
Besides iWork, what is there? I tried OpenOffice, and it was even worse.
Click to expand...

My customers are convinced they can write entire enterprise business class applications in Excel. So they come crying to me when their macros don't work on other people's machine because of a local dependency or when they update their copy of office and VBA flunks. It's always fun to smack people with a two by four for doing dumb things. :D

mattopotamus said:
Yeah, but the reality is that office is not going anywhere.
Click to expand...

Is anything really too big to fail?
 
roadbloc said:
You're joking right? For me, Office is the best just for Word. Pages just doesn't come close to some of the fantastic proofing and cloud features Word offers. Pages also seems terrible at handling large documents, especially when autosave freezes the app momentarily every five mins.
Click to expand...

I did not make any comparisons, I just said that Office is dull corporate bloatware. Decades of feature creep and gigabytes of clipart constitutes bloat, corporate and dull, well there are sexier software.

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donutbagel said:
Isn't all software corporate unless it's made by a non-profit organization or an individual?
Click to expand...

Eh, it's used in corporate settings, associated with such tasks, cubicles, Bill Lumbergh and TPS reports.
 
donutbagel said:
Because it's sold in way larger numbers and crashes a lot. The only thing more capable on it is Excel, but PowerPoint is still terrible, and Word is just OK if you ignore the startup time and instability.
Click to expand...

Really? I've been using office for over a decade, I've never had it crash on me,

Startup time? Instability? Can't say I've had those problems, maybe you should invest in decent hardware
 
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