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Microsoft Introduces Unified Office App for iOS and Android
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I've got to agree...I shuttered a few years ago when I saw different companies starting to move their features to separate apps (Facebook>Messenger, etc.). Glad MS is moving towards keeping them all in one app, hopefully others follow-suit. Maybe even Apple combines their three into an iCloud-esque app.
If you're referring to "programme", that's not a typo, but an alternative spelling of "program". People quite often use that secondary spelling (derived from French) for "programs for people"... as opposed to a computer program.
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I think the "giant, consolidated app" is the wrong approach, at least it's not the best approach for everything. Separate, specialized apps offer a better experience, so long as apps that belong together operate as a unified experience for the user.
I think the app-switching animation is a bit too jarring, and if Apple addressed that, then using multiple apps in a single workflow might be welcomed by more people.
Mobile is not desktop. Dealing with multiple apps is far easier with mouse and keyboard than on a phone sized touch screen.
Office productivity pieces naturally work with each other. You have a word processing document and need to insert a chart. Nobody watches a movie and suddenly thinks they need to sync their contacts to their phone at the same time.
OK, help me out here - I just can't see the typo (although there is an extra 'for' in the MR opening line, but you can hardly blame MS for that). I'm not even seeing the 'programme' that people are referring to, but that's how I spell it anyway; both are acceptable in UK English, even though the longer version is becoming rarer.
As for you second point, I think that's just terminology and the difference between 'compatible' (i.e. will run on) and 'optimised'.
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I personally think the MS Office Suite has come a very long way in the past 5 years. Everything from basic office suite to the newer apps like Sway and PowerBI have been great.
I would have to say that letting a guy who should have been a high school football coach run your company might be his biggest mistake, but I digress.
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The Beta is full.
Yup.
My concern is that this will suffer the same UX problems iTunes did. Jack of all trades, master of none. Cramming so much stuff into such a tiny screen seems risky.
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Ballmer was probably the right guy to keep the lights on at Microsoft for a decade. Financially, he did really well for the company.
But he wasn't the right guy to think beyond that decade. He screwed up the Vista launch from too much arrogance, then didn't see the sign of the times that Windows Everywhere was over.
(It's kind of interesting in retrospect how little time it took for the notion of proprietary Windows Media to become ridiculous.)
I try to look and think outside the square in all things in life, so try this one on for size:
Maybe subconsciously or even deliberately Gates put in a successor that he knew would compare poorly, or even fail so as not to diminish his own reputation/legacy/ego. The same could be said for Jobs and Cook! Crazy, I know. Or is it???
That's good news, because it's virtually unusable on mobile for anything other than viewing. I've tried using Word for iPad at various points since its release, and the end result is always data loss within the first hour of use. Maybe it works if you just store the files locally on your iOS device, but who does that? Once you introduce a cloud syncing solution — Box/iCloud Drive/Dropbox/etc — Word simply cannot reliably save the files.
I agree with your observations except for idea that MS came late to the game. They were leading the game before there was even a game. I did quite a bit of development on MS' mobile platforms during the late 90's and into the mid 00's.
Their flaw was that they lacked the determination to stick with it through tough times. As soon as the going got a little rocky, they pulled back and then tried to re-boot the platform. They tried re-re-rebooting 3 or 4 times and with each attempt to reboot, they lost the confidence of more developers. Why spend the time and money to develop something when MS is simply going to sunset it and start something new (that isn't quite compatible with what was old)?
So they are going to make it like iTunes. Just cram everything into one app and have bloatware. I hope they keep the iPad using separate and more fully featured versions. Having it not iPad optimized is a good sign that the iPad versions will be separate and likely be closer to the experience of a full Office version.
It's less bloatware. The issue is that with app sandboxing on Android, iOS, macOS and soon Windows (Application Guard, announced today), each individual app has to store and load their own resources. That means separate versions of libraries and things like fonts and clip art have to be stored on disk and loaded into RAM once per app.
By having a unified app, these resources can be shared.
You both are missing the fact that the "typo" didn't come from Microsoft. It's part of the article authored by MacRumors, not Microsoft.