Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Microsoft Losing Next Generation of Office Users by Delaying iOS Release
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
When my teenage kids collaborate on group school projects, they almost never use Office. They use google docs. They make real time edits while holding multiuser chats. The thought of emailing MS Office docs around and waiting for replies and revisions would seem absurdly slow to these kids.
The idea that some professors or teachers still require submittal of papers as Word doc seems equally ridiculous. If the prof wants to annotate or comment on a PDF, there are numerous tools for this purpose.
I think MS has a long term problem because more content is moving from the desktop to the cloud. Young people want rapid feedback at a texting and social media pace, and this will not change. It will accelerate. If MS thinks the future office workforce will slow down and adapt to their old model just to maintain desktop compatibility with their software products, they are very very wrong.
The idea that some professors or teachers still require submittal of papers as Word doc seems equally ridiculous. If the prof wants to annotate or comment on a PDF, there are numerous tools for this purpose.
I think MS has a long term problem because more content is moving from the desktop to the cloud. Young people want rapid feedback at a texting and social media pace, and this will not change. It will accelerate. If MS thinks the future office workforce will slow down and adapt to their old model just to maintain desktop compatibility with their software products, they are very very wrong.
As with everything, there are trade-offs. If Office isn't available on the platform of your choice that's making you much more efficient, then you can live without whatever Office-exclusive features there may be and use a slightly less efficient productivity suite. Obviously a lot of people are doing just fine without Office. Maybe Office on iOS would save them a little extra time, but using a Windows tablet would be a net loss.
Obviously the more choices, the better, and if Office was on other mobile platforms it would be good for consumers and possibly good for Microsoft. Certainly a case can be made that Microsoft has lost business. Is it enough lost business to be worth the development costs to port Office? We may never know for sure.
Obviously the more choices, the better, and if Office was on other mobile platforms it would be good for consumers and possibly good for Microsoft. Certainly a case can be made that Microsoft has lost business. Is it enough lost business to be worth the development costs to port Office? We may never know for sure.
Well, I think the point to the article is that the next generation of users will not be forced into software or hardware choices just to maintain compatibility with MS Office. They won't be forced into buying expensive Office desktop software updates or 365 subscriptions. They won't be forced in to buying bulky hybrid tablets with anemic ecosystems. Instead, they will use free cloud integrated tools that provide rapid collaboration capabilities.
No matter when it gets released it'll be too little too late. Sure, there are people who require some of the advanced functionality that MS Office provides, but the number of people who actually do is dwindling (it's such overkill for the vast majority of users), so they're turning to the myriad free or cheaper alternatives.
I'd be surprised if a lot of these efforts aren't being led by the CFO looking at ways to reduce their MS license renewal fees. Most people don't need pivot tables or any of those advanced types of features, so why pay for a suite?
MS locked people in as long as they could, and now that functionality is so basic and people don't require the extras the suite provided (above all the alternatives) that justifying it for every single employee in a company I think is getting more and more difficult.
Releasing an iPad version is something they should have done years ago, doing it today just smacks of closing the barn door after the horses have bolted.
I'd be surprised if a lot of these efforts aren't being led by the CFO looking at ways to reduce their MS license renewal fees. Most people don't need pivot tables or any of those advanced types of features, so why pay for a suite?
MS locked people in as long as they could, and now that functionality is so basic and people don't require the extras the suite provided (above all the alternatives) that justifying it for every single employee in a company I think is getting more and more difficult.
Releasing an iPad version is something they should have done years ago, doing it today just smacks of closing the barn door after the horses have bolted.
If I sent a Word document to Dave and he told me to to put it in Quip I'd tell him to kiss my ass since you can open a Word document in WordPad for free on Windows without installing anything and/or and you can view a Word document for free out of the box on most smartphones and/or you can download OpenOffice or one of it's many forks on any other desktop / laptop platform to view the thing.
----------
It's because that's the Microsoft way. They don't innovate, they copy or purchase competitors. It worked brilliantly during the PC era, mostly because they were at the right place at the right time in signing that initial deal with IBM to produce the OS for their PC's and they successfully rode that wave and continued it by copying the Mac's OS to create Windows but they missed the boat big time when it came to mobile and they are now so far behind I don't think they'll ever catch up.
It's a catch 22. They need to attract developers to their platform so there are enough applications to attract users but at the same time developers don't want to develop for an OS that doesn't have many users.
In the long run, I don't know if Office would have done a lot better if it had been released for iOS a while ago.
It's a bloated, overly-complicated, albatross that only lives on the (inevitably deflating) circular logic of compatibility with itself.
No significant number of people will pay $100+ to put that mess on their iPads.
They will have to sell it a lot cheaper (or free), so it won't be the cash cow MS needs it to be And that still doesn't make it any less of a bloated mess that people would prefer to avoid. One of the huge advantages of these post-PC devices is much simpler, more intuitive software which Office is the opposite of.
I think the level of success they've had with Surface tablets shows how little people have been waiting for this to be available on their mobile devices.
It's a bloated, overly-complicated, albatross that only lives on the (inevitably deflating) circular logic of compatibility with itself.
No significant number of people will pay $100+ to put that mess on their iPads.
They will have to sell it a lot cheaper (or free), so it won't be the cash cow MS needs it to be And that still doesn't make it any less of a bloated mess that people would prefer to avoid. One of the huge advantages of these post-PC devices is much simpler, more intuitive software which Office is the opposite of.
I think the level of success they've had with Surface tablets shows how little people have been waiting for this to be available on their mobile devices.
I've gotten used to iwork apps now... Numbers is pretty good, Keynote is amazing, pages is decent. Screw MS for waiting so long. Don't need to spent $ when the iWork suite is getting better and is now free!!! Also, I'll never pay subscription fees for software.
Word and powerpoint in the 4th grade? Why?
Kids at that age barely have decent hand writing. And they haven't put together any complex "presentations" yet. Why would they need office apps at that age?
Unless you need to just view or make simple alterations to an existing spreadsheet, in that case Numbers is fine 90%+ of the time.
Note to Microsoft: Office isn't the lock-out spec, iPad is.
Remember all those years when everybody knew what Wordstar compatibility was but nobody knew what Wordstar was? Import/Export of Word format is going to be all anyone remembers of this product unless MS gets their act together.
Remember all those years when everybody knew what Wordstar compatibility was but nobody knew what Wordstar was? Import/Export of Word format is going to be all anyone remembers of this product unless MS gets their act together.
I've often found Pages more Word compatible than Word is. The one place Word has a potential benefit is writing long, complex documents-- not the kind of work you'll be doing on the iPad.
Arguably not the kind of work most people do at all. Ironically, Word is becoming niche.
Keynote is 90% Powerpoint compatible for import (much less for export). Numbers remains disappointing.
Interesting observation. However, Microsoft's success has always hinged on being late to the party. Their MO is to show up very late to a very established market, buy their way in, and bully everyone else out. They did this with Windows vs. Mac, Word vs. WordPerfect, IE vs. Netscape, Xbox vs Nintendo. This is distinctly different from Apple which enters markets at their nascent stage and then grows them.
The real question is why doesn't Microsoft's MO work anymore? Are they not spending enough money? Are they too scared to bully the way they once did? Did everyone else simply get wise to their ways? Have they forgotten what their MO is and started wasting a bunch of time trying do things they are bad at such as innovation?
Exactly right. When Microsoft was designing Office 2011, they did surveys around the biggest Office users - universities, companies, etc - about what they wanted in the next version of Office.
7 of the top 10 suggestions were already in Office.
What this says to me is two things:
1. The interface was bad. Nobody could discover what the product did. Microsoft created the "Ribbon" interface to deal with that (which I liked).
2. Most people probably weren't using the advanced features in Office. The franchise has been going on for so long that Microsoft has had to keep adding things to sell upgrades, but the truth is that there's only so much you need in an Office suite.
What's "hemorrhages" ? oh nevermind...
It seems iOS users want to use apps as they want, not to be consumed by a big bloat by Office. I'm not sure but on iOS, can you only install the app you need, or you must install all ?
If so, then this could be why people arn't using it.....
Likewise on my Mac, i only install stuff what i need. (as for the iLife stuff that comes with Mac, I just zerodisk Hard dive and re-install) solution solved. The only app I *do* use is iMovie,
The same with Office when i installed on my parents PC... only custom,, and the same should apply to iOS too. There are some things Office just does better too, then Numbers, Pages... But personally, I think this is REALLY about "Microsoft can't get what it wants".
aka do what it wants to its own apps, but can't because of Apple's own lock-down on iOS.. I bet that's the real reason.. MS wants to do more, probably want more access, and Apple says no. MS says "ok, we'll pulling out." but says "it's been delayed."
It seems iOS users want to use apps as they want, not to be consumed by a big bloat by Office. I'm not sure but on iOS, can you only install the app you need, or you must install all ?
If so, then this could be why people arn't using it.....
Likewise on my Mac, i only install stuff what i need. (as for the iLife stuff that comes with Mac, I just zerodisk Hard dive and re-install) solution solved. The only app I *do* use is iMovie,
The same with Office when i installed on my parents PC... only custom,, and the same should apply to iOS too. There are some things Office just does better too, then Numbers, Pages... But personally, I think this is REALLY about "Microsoft can't get what it wants".
aka do what it wants to its own apps, but can't because of Apple's own lock-down on iOS.. I bet that's the real reason.. MS wants to do more, probably want more access, and Apple says no. MS says "ok, we'll pulling out." but says "it's been delayed."
I'll be interested in seeing if Microsoft actually has anything cool with the new version of Office. I doubt it, but competition is always good (and now that they don't hold a monopoly, it really is competition, as opposed to in the past when they could release crap once every three years because there wasn't any particularly viable competition.)
At least in the past people used to know what a letter and what a newspaper was.
But never before I've heard someone mentioning something called a "Quip".
I wonder what that might be? Not even the oldest people I know have a remote idea.
