Office 2013: Microsoft Cloud Era Begins In Earnest 241
snydeq writes "Microsoft's release of Office 2013 represents the latest in a series of makeover moves, this time aimed at shifting use of its bedrock productivity suite to the cloud. Early hands-on testing suggests Office 2013 is the 'best Office yet,' bringing excellent cloud features and pay-as-you-go pricing to Office. But Microsoft's new vision for remaining nimble in the cloud era comes with some questions, such as what happens when your subscription expires, not to mention some gray areas around inevitable employee use of Office 2013 Home Premium in business settings."
Zordak points to coverage of the new Office model at CNN Money, and says "More interesting than the article itself is the comments. The article closes by asking 'Will you [pay up]?' The consensus in the comments is a resounding 'NO,' with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity." Also at SlashCloud.
Cloud computing's Achilles heal... (Score:5, Insightful)
...will always be the user's internet connection -- not just in terms of being connected, but likely also having sufficient bandwidth. I can appreciate the usefulness of "cloud computing" -- which is really just an extension of dumb terminals and network storage packaged in this new buzzphrase. However, it really only makes sense in environments in which they have control over the network availability as well. Even Google Docs, with no price tag, is only as nice as my network connection.
What this does for MS Office is that it now has a new form of DRM -- in the sense that you can only run office if you connect to Microsoft -- and they don' t have to advertise it as being DRM.
Re:Best Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any high-quality software? All MS software is riddled with bugs and blatant stupidity, but so is linux and OSX. The argument isn't really about which software is the best, but which sucks least. Software is a tool - if it was perfect, you wouldn't even notice it.
Re:Bought it yesterday (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. For any sort of real office/administrative work, MS Office beats the pants off Open/Libre Office. The latter's functionality in terms of two major office needs (mail merges and pivot tables, not to mention scaling spreadsheets for print) sucks to the point of being basically unusable. MS Office is typical Microsoft (different than standards for no good reason; eg. the wildcard for strings in Access is * not %), but Excel and Word are simply so much better than anything else out there that for REAL work, there's no viable alternative.
Of course, home use is a different story altogether.
Re:In the end... (Score:5, Insightful)
In small business MS is going to competing with Google and OO.org and the derivatives.
MS is still successful with MS Office due to file format lockin. You want to work with other firms, who are probably running MS Office.
Although Apple Pages is not online, all storage is now online by default. This means that one can work off any Mac or iPad. Also you pay for Pages once and load on all Macs and iPad registered to your account. So there is that.
Re:Who cares about the subscription look at the TO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bought it yesterday (Score:4, Insightful)
Still leaps and bounds better than most everything else out there.
NO. If all you want is to write letters or send memos around the office, then Microsoft Word is fine. If you actually care about what your document looks like, then it's not fine.
Try typesetting a book sometime in Microsoft Word. It is a lesson in pain as you try to get your page sizes to line up right, get the images in the right places, get things exactly the way you want them. Look around the web for stories from people who've tried, it will be instructive. The worst part is, once you get everything exactly how you want in one version of Word, it will look different in other versions.
Adobe XI, XeLatex, Pages, OpenOffice, or even VIM+Postscript are better choices depending on what you wish to accomplish.