Some who are anti-subscription for MS Office have no problems with subscription services for their music.
Call me a dino - I still buy music on a physical CD if at all possible and then import it into my iTunes library myself!
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Office for iPad Pro Requires Subscription
- Thread starter KPOM
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Call me a dino - I still buy music on a physical CD if at all possible and then import it into my iTunes library myself!
And if Microsoft did a one time license ... how long should the support be? This isn't like Windows, where backwards compatibility is king. This is iOS, where things might crash because you updated to the newest yearly release. How should the single license move between devices?
They can't price it like Apple, or have Apple's strategies. Apple is not a software company.
Professional software can (and should) have a reasonable price to equate to their features and services. I expect most iPad Pro-specific apps to be much more expensive, and I'm OK with that, as long as they're also much more powerful. Office for iPad isn't even iPad Pro-specific, but the price is justified if you really want Microsoft Office support, otherwise, enjoy the free iWork apps you'll undoubtedly get.
This race-to-the-bottom $0.99 app thing isn't sustainable for most businesses. Office 365 is very reasonable for what you get (access to the apps on desktop, mobile, and web, 1TB OneDrive, etc), and you can usually buy the Home Premium license cards on eBay (or similar) for decent discounts anyway.
I would have no qualms with spending $100+ on an app, if the features and long-term support backed it up.
This race-to-the-bottom $0.99 app thing isn't sustainable for most businesses. Office 365 is very reasonable for what you get (access to the apps on desktop, mobile, and web, 1TB OneDrive, etc), and you can usually buy the Home Premium license cards on eBay (or similar) for decent discounts anyway.
I would have no qualms with spending $100+ on an app, if the features and long-term support backed it up.
A perpetual license is not renting, because it doesn't expire. My biggest problem with a subscription is that it forces me to continually pay no matter if I'm happy with the product development or not. With a perpetual license, I can skip updates if I feel they don't provide enough improvement or innovation, so I am not forced to reward "laziness" on the part of the developer. E.g. I have skipped Office 2013 and am still happily chugging along with my 2010 version (for Windows), because I didn't feel 2013 was worth it for me.
If all software is sold on a subscription basis one day, what incentive do the companies have to improve and innovate?
Of course--you are an actual user, while the great majority of windows/office posts are made by windows haters who construct fantasy scenarios about bricked computers, etc. That said-I agree windows 10 is disappointing, and the upgrade paths provided by MS are problematic.
I don't understand the "subscription hate"--when you figure in upgrade costs for traditional pay once models are often close in cost to subscription fees.
I actually think that 8.1 and 10 have been great. As one example, my 2007 C2D 4GB Dell XPS M1330 runs much better/faster on 8.1 and 10 than it ever ran on 7 or Vista. But to your main point, subscription-hate...speaking purely for myself...
Yes, there's an element of irrationality but it's not all that.
- The economics only works as you say if the publisher is updating the software fairly regularly, say, annually. The last version of Office for Mac was 2011 - think about how much more we would have paid at $10/month over five years.
- Adobe's cloud installation and updater have been highly problematic. A true local installation is much easier for me to maintain.
- Adobe requires the machine to phone home periodically. Sometimes that's not possible. I don't want to be have my subscription lock up if I can't get online.
- More subjective, but FWIW, I really do believe that Adobe has gotten sloppier since they moved mostly to the cloud/subscription model. It doesn't have to be that way, obviously, but I think it is and I can see it staying that way. (Of course, we all seem to be beta testers for EVERY manufacturer more and more these days... )
I'm OK with that too, but Apple really needs to add a trial period mechanism to the app store to support it.
You know, this style of argument (people who share your view are knowledgeable experts, people who disagree with you are clueless haters) is fairly symptomatic of shills and trolls.
A large number of people do not need the bloated suite that Office is, which is why you encounter plenty of professional and part-time users who are perfectly fine with alternatives that are free or cheaper. At my company, nobody uses Office products anymore, because unless you relay on MS support, it's an easily saved cost. We've even started to shift projects over to Google's services.
I have no trouble seeing why Pages may be perfectly sufficient for a sizable number of users.
Upgrades are optional. Subscriptions require you to keep paying in order to use the product at all, regardless of how much you've already paid in the past. Companies haven't started to switch to that model because it loses them money. It's cheaper in the beginning, but more expensive in the long run.
My company gives each employee 10 licenses for Office 365 to use on either business or personal devices. Because Office 2016 is free and is actually really nice, I use it on my iPhone, Macbook Pro, work PC (crappy Dell), and soon my new iPad. I fully admit that it's the Cadillac of office software.
But if it wasn't free, there's no way I'd pay yearly for it. iWork does all the things I need to do with office software, and I could limp along on that no problem and save my $85 a year or whatever it costs now.
I know MS needs to make their money--I'm not saying that Office isn't worth the money the charge. (To some it is, and to some it isn't.) I'm just saying I think a lot of people drooling over the iPad Pro probably don't need Office and also probably don't need an iPad as powerful as the Pro (or even the Air 2). Just a guess.
But if it wasn't free, there's no way I'd pay yearly for it. iWork does all the things I need to do with office software, and I could limp along on that no problem and save my $85 a year or whatever it costs now.
I know MS needs to make their money--I'm not saying that Office isn't worth the money the charge. (To some it is, and to some it isn't.) I'm just saying I think a lot of people drooling over the iPad Pro probably don't need Office and also probably don't need an iPad as powerful as the Pro (or even the Air 2). Just a guess.
Is msft office going to be any different for iPad pro? I use my 365 subscription for my iPad mini, don't know how this will differ?
On your mini, you don't need your 365 subscription to view or do basic document edits. Same with the Air. You do unlock extra editing features on top of basic editing when you have a 365 subscription: https://products.office.com/en-us/office-resources#table8
Office on iPad Pro will not have any editing capabilities at all without Office 365.
The issue was cross office/apple notes cross platform compatibility. If apple products or google products work for you, fine.
It's almost never about the app/program (though there are exceptions: Excel simply slaughters the competition, including Numbers). What it is about, and what it's always been about although most people were very slow to realize this, is communication, sharing and collaboration. Lotus 123 was great not so much because it was a great program (though it was) but because an analyst at Company A could share a file with an accountant at Firm B and a banker at Bank C.
Nothing succeeds like success. I could go on for hours about all the defects and limitations of MS Office but in real life, unless you work in a cave by yourself, MS Office is where it's at because the people you need to work with use MS Office. It's pretty clear that Apple doesn't really intend iWork to compete with MS Office in any case: if they did, there would be a native version for Windows.
Nothing succeeds like success. I could go on for hours about all the defects and limitations of MS Office but in real life, unless you work in a cave by yourself, MS Office is where it's at because the people you need to work with use MS Office. It's pretty clear that Apple doesn't really intend iWork to compete with MS Office in any case: if they did, there would be a native version for Windows.
The problem with this is that some companies, like the one I work for, will not go to 365. It doesn't make sense for our business model. We have a lot of iPads out in the field that our employees use in front of our members. We've already decided that we will use VDI with desktop office before we will switch to 365.
What confuses me more about this is I have been to several of the road maps for Microsoft this year. At each one they have stated that they had to rethink their mobile strategy with office because so many companies were in the same boat as ours - refusing to use 365 for enterprise.
So is MS Office online, a much better solution than Google.