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.
This sounds harder to pirate. (Score:3, Funny)
Pass.
In the end... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft would be best served by making it free or nearly free for home use and subscription for business use. It is the same model they use for AV, and it works fairly well. Enterprise businesses need Enterprise level support and tools, they will pay because they have no choice.
Sure, you will probably lose some small businesses, but they were not going to upgrade anyway.
This way Office stays the defacto productivity suite, new users (kids) use it at home by default, and businesses have to either retrain every user on a new suite, or pay for office (hint, most will pay for office, no one likes being retrained).
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hint, most will pay for office, no one likes being retrained
Like most non-tech users felt going from Office 2003 -> 2007 -> 2010?
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.
"Take Office home for just $9.95" (Score:3)
At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.
The Microsoft Home Use Program [microsofthup.com] is still very much alive.
HUP has a global reach and is multilingual.
The current bundle is Office Professional Plus 2013, which includes Lync.
Regional pricing varies a little, up and down. If you happen to be one of the sixty or so people living in the Pitcarin Islands, the cost is $15, plus S&H on the media. if required.
Ars Technica had this to say about Office 365 Home Premium:
Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013---Office 2013 Home and Student---is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.
Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite---including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage.
While you can install Office on five systems at once through Home Premium, where those five licenses are is fungible. You can manage which computers are actively using their Office user licenses from the account webpage, and you can shut off one to make room for another when necessary. That means your licenses can travel with you from computer to computer, and---at least theoretically, if you keep all your data in SkyDrive or a networked drive---you can be up and running with a new PC in a manner of minutes.
Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service [arstechnica.com]
Phrases like "
It won't happen (Score:2)
Because Ballmer is an idiot.
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It's hard to imagine that non-business users will pay for this. I imagine that most home users will shell out $120 for the Home version of Office every 6 yrs or so. That's 1/6 of the subscription cost over the same period. I could see MSFT charging $10/month for non-business licenses to ALL MSFT products (including windows).
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It's hard to imagine that non-business users will pay for this. I imagine that most home users will shell out $120 for the Home version of Office every 6 yrs or so. That's 1/6 of the subscription cost over the same period. I could see MSFT charging $10/month for non-business licenses to ALL MSFT products (including windows).
I"ve come up with a better solution.
I'm using Office 2003. It works just fine for what I need, it's already paid for so there's no additional costs and it doesn't have the stupid "ribbon" that renders programs unusable.
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At least a crack user is getting something they want for their money.
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Everyone is happy when the case is closed.
No thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Same. The only time I've found cloud apps useful is for collaboration projects where more than one person is working on the same document at a time and something like Hg/SVN won't work.
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I google drive because it works on the iPad and that is my biggest complaint about google drive. I can view the files in offline mode, but I can't edit them. So, why would I pay microsoft for something google gives me for free?
Besides, don't they realize that we all buy one copy of office anyway and just install it on all our PCs? If google would let your edit offline and stopped sucking at formatting, I would never use MS word.
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you are not the target market, which is idiots. However, as PT Barnum observed, there is one born every minute - it must be true: MS is still the market leader.
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Re:No thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how it works. Everything I have in skydrive is synced to each of my systems. So my docs are always kept up to date yet are still available when I go off the grid.
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I dont want to have to be online inorder to work on a document.
Good news, that's not at all what office 2013 is. It's just adding extra features should you happen to be on an internet connection.
Think sharepoint but not shitastic awful.
Who needs it? (Score:2)
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Which is basically the only thing why MS does sell newer versions: Stupid people that cannot distinguish between "new" and "better". Unfortunately, many of them make it to management as they cannot do anything well.
For home use, OpenOffice is more than good enough (Score:2)
What in the world do I get out of MS office, in or out of the cloud that I don't get in a basic office package of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing. Admittedly, the graphics package could be more user-friendly, but there are FOSS substitutes for that too. The bottom line is the bottom line. Money for MS Office or no money for OpenOffice.
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"The hard way" here is to write software instead of buying it from Microsoft. If it weren't for geeks doing things the hard way, there wouldn't be an OpenOffice or a LibreOffice for trolls like you to use.
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except are split by rigid computer-geek philosophical divides
Except that a lot of those rigid philosophical geeks are the former developers of OpenOffice, and the ones who forked it to LibreOffice. Granted, now that OO is under Apache's stewardship (as opposed to Oracle) it might be nice if they pooled resources. Not sure if they already do this or not.
Who cares about the subscription look at the TOS (Score:5, Interesting)
"Only one person at a time may use the software on each licensed computer or licensed device. The service/software may not be used for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities."
So if your kids want to use Word to make a Lemonade Stand sign so they can sell Lemonade for .05 a cup on the front lawn? Ilegal!
Even worse your kids want to help out with Hurricane Sandy relief by making signs and posting them around the neighborhood telling people how they can help their local non-profit? Illegal!
Or I guess you can't even print up an Ad that you plan on hanging in the local supermarket saying you have a couch for sale?
Btw you wanna bet MS themselves hosts templates designed specifically for these activities?
It's time we hold these companies accountable for the crap they shove in the TOS. What Microsoft is doing is BS and they need to be called on it. Feel free to email Microsoft and tell them that you wanted to buy Office 2013 but because their TOS make both you and your children criminals, you went with Openoffice etc instead.
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Re:Who cares about the subscription look at the TO (Score:5, Insightful)
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don't have mod points so +1 anyway
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I know this is slashdot, but try reading the second sentence, hun.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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When a subscription is removed, all data is permanently lost.
Bwahh ha ha ha the black hats going to have fun cancelling businesses accounts.
"Hi, its me, I just wanted to let you know that we've switched to apple macs so you cancel our accounts. Bye bye. Love, Ford Motor co" Really? Destruction of data is going to be just that simple?
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I know this isn't what your point was getting at but why would switching to macs change anything? This is for both macs and pcs.
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When a subscription expires, the subscription enters a brief grace period during which administrators receive notification email messages and see alerts, when they log in to the Office 365 portal, that warn that the subscription will soon be disabled.
If you do not renew the subscription, the subscription will soon be disabled; user accounts assigned to the expired subscription are disabled, and users are unable to access the expired subscription. However, administ
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1) I don't care. I would be fine if it was instantly made unavailable when the subscription runs out. My skydrive is fully synced at all times. If your only copy is in the cloud you get what you deserve when it rains.
2) Buying more space is cheap.
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I'm mystified as to why these questions keep getting asked, as the answers are blindingly obvious.
How long will I have access to my documents?
Until, at Microsoft's sole, arbitrary discretion, Microsoft says you no longer have access to them.
What happens to my documents if I am using 100% of Skydrive (including the additional 20GB)?
Whatever Microsoft, at its sole and arbitrary discretion, says happens to them at that particular random moment in time.
Bottom line: if your data are only available on someone else's servers, especially those of a multi-convicted, monopolistic felon, you're already screwed. You just haven't yet woken up to that i
Sync locally (Score:2)
After using Google Drive for a while, it seems clear to me that the best way to operate is to have a local folder which automatically syncs to the cloud (pretty sure MS offers something like this too). This way you don't really have to worry about how long your access lasts because you have local copies of everything. I would hope that the new cloud-centric apps with collaborative features would do something like this in reverse... save to the cloud and sync locally.
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No thanks ... (Score:2)
Subscription software has no interest for me, and neither does storing stuff in the cloud.
If you can't sell me stand-alone software that works and doesn't require on-going fees and access to your servers ... well, I'll just use someone else's software.
I can't imagine most organizations wanting their Office docs in the cloud.
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My PHB is very keen on moving everything to the cloud. He doesn't actually know what the cloud is or anything like that, he has just noticed it as a listed feature on a load of ads.
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.
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A lot of people work in situations where they cannot have internet access. I spend a lot of time on overwater airliners - typically no internet. I'm often in countries where internet access is unreliable, or untrustworthy. The facility where I work has areas where cell and wireless are not available.
I cannot use cloud-only applications even if I wanted to, which I don't. I'm actually quite happy with the functionality of microsoft apps, but if they move to a cloud-only model, I will need to switch to some a
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http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-premium/#FAQs [microsoft.com]
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The FAQ does not say it requires internet access to actually use the products in their original form (only to upgrade, manage account, save to SkyDrive, etc).
Here is what the FAQ in your link says for the "cloud" version of office (i.e. Office 365):
Internet access is required to install and activate all the latest releases of Office suites and all Office 365 plans.
Internet access is also required to manage, update, and access subscription versions of Office, including Office 365 Home Premium. You need to go online to www.office.com/myaccount to manage your subscription account. For example, if you want to install Office on another PC or device, or to change billing options. You need to connect to the Internet regularly to keep your version of Office up to date and to benefit from automatic upgrades.
Internet connectivity is also required to access the Office 365 additional features such as SkyDrive and Skype world minutes.
Two words: Defense Dept (Score:3)
Thought experiment (Score:3)
Thought experiment - self destruction of the office suite... What would happen? My guess is a dramatic increase in productivity.
1) Can't waste time on powerpoints
2) Can't use Excel as the corporate database management system
3) Can't use Word as the corporate database management system. Wordpad is good enough for the average user. In fact even wordpad has too many features for the average goofball.
4) Can't produce meaningless made up metrics using excel
5) Nobody uses outlook unless they have to, so I'd expect a dramatic surge in gmail popularity. Maybe g+/FB/twitter make some inroads into business communication. Linkedin should be paying attention at the change to intermediate themselves as a business social network.
I'm seeing a distinct possibility of a dramatic upsurge in business productivity... either that ore more time spent in meetings and at the water cooler gossip. either way the world would be a better place without office suites.
"Pay as you go" - "Rental" (Score:2)
Cloud computing = forced (unwanted) upgrades (Score:2)
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You having to put money aside for continual re-traininig is really :) not a problem for cloud service provider. It's a problem for you - deal with it!
That's the point. If the cloud provider updates their end, and I am running a business using their software, I'm stuck having to deal with it (training-wise) as you put it. As a customer of said cloud service, I would be pretty pissed off if suddenly my company was forced into having to upgrade when what my company was using worked just fine.
My Data is My Data (Score:3)
My response to Office being Cloud-based is this: JUST SAY NO.
As has been mentioned above my comment, there are multiple problems with this one being HIPAA laws for who can see patient documents. I would also be greatly concerned about corporate espionage - if the corporation was dumb enough to use Cloud Office in the first place. What better way to siphon off sensitive data from other corporations than to host all their files in your cloud?
My strongest reason is even simpler than all of those - my data is my data is my data. It should reside on my home network, not in the cloud. It should be where I can get to it when I need it, without having to worry about if I paid my Office fee for access this month. It should be where I can manipulate it if need be, so that I can read it in a different program than the one it was created in. And it should for ever and all time be MINE. Not Microsoft's. Not Google's. Not Apple's. While the great majority of us who are technically inclined understand planned obsolescence and the inanity of depending on someone else to keep our saved files all nice and neat and accessible, the _public_ at large does not. We should be educating them on "the 3v1Ls" of such and the long list of companies that suddenly vanished after taking a lot of people's money, regardless of it was the corporation's fault they closed or some government's.
Traditional SKU still available (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to remember that there are 2 ways of buying Office 2013 (at least for home use): Office 2013 and Office 365. MS has a nice simple comparison here [microsoft.com]. The $99/year gets you 5 computers while the other SKUs only let you install on 1 computer.
One important change for the stand-alone SKUs is the # of computers you can install on. In Office 2010, there were SKUs that let you install on 3 PCs for "Home & Student" edition or 2 PCs for "Home and Business" edition. While Office 2013 is 1PC for all editions of the stand-alone. I'm guessing this is MS trying to push Office 365 (the subscription).
If I was installing on 5 PCs, the subscription may be worth it, but I'm not sure I like the idea of my software license expiring and possibly losing data.
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They will keep moving towards renting the software.
The good news is there are lots of alternatives these days. Most of those are even free.
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EditsForSure (Score:2)
I remember the whole PlaysForSure fiasco, where at first, PlaysForSure was a new DRM that was incompatible with a good chunk of the players out at the time. Then, PlaysForSure servers got shut off, stranding people who bought their music legitimately.
For music, at least I can re-get the music someplace else. But for docs, these are my files, I can't go to documentbay.se and get my files from there.
I think a lot of people will be careful with this.
Office no longer transferrable (Score:2)
One thing that is not getting nearly the press it deserves, is that Microsoft changed the licensing on the desktop versions of Office. Unless previous versions, Office is no longer transferrable. So if you ever upgrade your computer, you have to buy a new copy of Office otherwise you are out of compliance.
I was actually really looking forward to trying Office 2013, but that one change alone makes it a dealbreaker.
http://office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=1784 [office-watch.com]
$100 A Year For Home Use? Is That A Joke? (Score:3)
Who is this Earnest...? (Score:2)
... and how does he feel about a Cloud Era beginning in him? Also, any word from his friend Frank?
Surprise. Surprise. (Score:3)
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.
Perfectly predictable ---
and as utterly meaningless as the responses to any self-selecting online poll.
Now and again Ars Technica enjoys puncturing the geek's wish-fulfillment and over-inflated ego with a headline like this: Microsoft fails to notice the death of the PC, posts record revenue figures instead. [arstechnica.com]
"The Windows Division once more becomes the company's biggest money-maker."
New GUI (Score:2)
I provide end-user support for all types of software. When Microsoft launches something new, I force myself to use it so I become familiar with it. Accordingly, I just "upgraded" from Office 2010 to Office 2013. I am astounded at how ugly the new interface is. It's the same level of disgust I felt when I first experienced the Metro interface in Windows 8.
I don't know if Microsoft is going to succeed in the mobile arena with their new paradigm, but I am damn sure they're going to alienate desktop users in dr
Re:What about security-paranoid companies? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about HIPPA or other similar regulatory limitations on who can see your documents?
Seems like those would kill this sort of move just as dead.
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...but it won't receive regular updates like Cloud Office will
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Even simpler: We do security consulting and frequently our customers only allow us to store and process data and documents on servers under our control. That means any "cloud" office is completely out of the question. Perhaps this is fortunate, as Office has constantly been getting worse during the last decade. I cannot imagine what GUI design atrocities they have added this time, although "the ribbon" will be hard to top.
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I think MS has an option for a "private" cloud where you get to keep the servers under your control and you still get cloud like features.
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Well, yes, they will have that. But this still means I cannot work while traveling and I have to run one more server, likely with an expensive (but mostly useless) MS "server" OS on it. No, text processing in all its form is a job for a stand-alone machine, and external version control if needed. Bad enough that Office file formats play havoc with version control systems like Subversion.
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That means any "cloud" office is completely out of the question.
I know the perfect theme song for this product.
Turnaround, off the Onwards Through the Fog album.
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Yikes! That reminds me of what a monochrome Mac Classic looked like 20 years ago.
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Contrast is configurable - File > Account > Office Theme - Dark Gray Agreed the default is not enough contrast.
Microsoft: in our software, we always make sure the default configuration is the least usable of all configurations, so that users will have to (change theme | install start menu | turn off indexing of all mercurial repos | what have you) themselves.
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In VS there's a "backdoor" to disable this - set:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion = 1
I don't know of anything like that for Office 2013.
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If an organization were silly enough to store HIPAA government data like personal health records on MSFT's Office cloud service, they would deserve the requisite regulatory smackdown.
Personally, I'd be more worried that this puts a corporation - and not an especially ethical one - in between me and my data, and that I can't any longer get between others (government, snoops, privacy breaches on the MSFT side) and that data.
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pay per use: 50 cents per document save (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck why not just meter it. You can pay per document saved or minutes of use. That way if I can have all my legacy documents stored and available on any computer and I just pay when I open them up to edit them. No seats just copies attached to credit cards accounts. No one time big payment.
then when you get sent an MS word document you can edit it (for a price). Viewing could be free.
This way you would not need an internet connection to pay (though that could be one way). Instead a security conscious company could buy a hundred thousand thousand one-time codes that you would enter every time you wanted to save a document. You dole these out internally. Sure people could cheat but they can do that now with cracked licensees if they really want to. Significant Bussinesses won't cheat.
The whole concept here is like a terminator crop from monsanto where you do all the work raising the seed but it won't grow unless you pay Monsanto for the magic chemical it has been engineered to need. In this case you do the install and maintenance on your computer everything is local and under your control but you pay for a code when you want to save a new document.
What matters then is the cost. Suppose the cost to buy it was $300, the cost to subscibe was $150 and the cost to meter it was 50 cents per document save. Which would appeal to you?
penny per save (Score:2)
Now that I think about it more, it seems like a penny per document-save would come out about right. I probably save a working document 50 times before its final. and I produce hundreds of documents per year. So that would work out to be a bit more than the ownership price.
Would you buy MS word if it was a penny per document-save?
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I have never paid for MS Office in my entire life (and never used MS Office on my home machinery ever since OpenOffice was first released.)
I strongly suspect that most other folks can say the same - that they either use FOSS by now, or just use a copy 'borrowed' from work, the local torrent warehouse, or wherever.
Serious question - who on Earth actually pays for the thing for home use?
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Parents of students suckered by the sales staff in PC world, I would guess.
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The mainstream media dub every Microsoft product 'the best yet!', even when it sucks.
It never pays to insult a heavy advertiser.
This is the best poop I've ever tasted!
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The mainstream media dub every Microsoft product 'the best yet!', even when it sucks.
It never pays to insult a heavy advertiser.
This is the best poop I've ever tasted!
What I always wonder is why they would release a version that is worse than the previous version. Shouldn't any new version of any product be the 'best yet?' Of course, this is the company that released Vista and gave us the ribbon interface.
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Pretty sure it's Microsoft itself that says it's 'the best yet'.
Mainstream media just can't come up with their own words.
Re:Best Yet (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using the Office 365 trial version for a while now. I'm not really sure it's "best yet", but it doesn't feel like a step in the wrong direction, either. Really, the only thing I've noticed about it is that it has more eye candy, with more animations and and such. I'm not a fan of the "save as" page, though--it keeps changing the default save location on me.
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.
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Architecture? 6,000 years old (at-least)
Software Design? 50 years old (at best).
The other fields grew because of vast peer review of shared knowledge of experimentation & improvement. Of software design, only open-source can grow that way. If you want to avoid blatant stupidity, go open.
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Indeed. I seem to remember that Windows 8 is also "best yet", while clearly a really bad lemon. Perhaps MS products are just so bad that "best yet" really means "least bad so far"? I am waiting for some incarnation of their products that actually reach "good". Win 7 at least reached "reasonable" if you do not use it for servers or mobile devices. Office is straight in the "bad" class for 2003, 2007 and 2010, with downward tendency. I cannot imagine 2013 doing any better. Maybe if the dropped the atrocity ca
Re:Best Yet (Score:4, Funny)
Finally, the year of the Linux desktop is here.
Footnote: Win8 probably has more market share than Linux now by now.
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I suspect that most new Windows 8 devices remain intact only as long as it takes to pop in a pirated copy of Windows 7...
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There is no technical reason 8 drivers wouldn't work on 7. Vista, 7, and 8 have the same driver model.
Re:Best Yet (Score:5, Funny)
No, those are the homeless people.
The people switching to Linux are all in their basements, so you can't see them.
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Right, I can see from my window the droves of users moving from Windows to Linux (or even Mac).
That's the beautiful thing abut Android. Linux users are everywhere and they don't even know that they're Linux users.
If I lived in an urban center and could see something other than deer through my window, I'd see droves of Linux and Mac users, too.
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.
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the shills are getting too lazy... not even signing up for new accounts
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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.
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Try typesetting a book sometime in Microsoft Word.
Why in the name of god would you want to do that?
Layout and design for publication is a trade and profession in itself. It has always demanded a very different set of skills and tools then the writer's.
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Yes, that seems like a reasonable use for the average home user.
Wordpad fills the needs of the average home user. The only good reason to use Microsoft word is the network effect.
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