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Should Microsoft Put Office On the iPad?
theodp writes "Microsoft is working on a touch-friendly version of Office for Windows 8, writes GeekWire's Todd Bishop. But what about Microsoft Office on the iPad? 'The decision,' Bishop says, 'will say a lot about Microsoft's priorities in this new era. The company can give Windows 8 a boost if it makes Office exclusive to Windows-based tablets. But that's also a risk. The iPad's momentum not only in the home but in the workplace opens the door for Office alternatives to take hold on the Apple tablet, posing a challenge to Microsoft Office.' Over at Minimal Mac, Patrick Rhone feels Microsoft has bigger problems than the lack of Office apps for iOS and Android. 'Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was,' writes Rhone, 'Microsoft's biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really. And that will be what ultimately kills them.' Perhaps, but BusinessInsider — which finds it just can't quit Excel — also makes a case for why Microsoft should put Office on every platform. Speaking of the future of Office, did you ever notice how people use MS-Word to convince people to use Google Docs?"
No way. Typing on my iPad is one of the most awkward things I do in a day, but I don't blame the device. There are people in my same department at work that I have seen knock out multipage emails on one as if sitting at a regular computer.
I dunno, I just can't do it so Office would be worthless. My iPad is basically a youtube, game device, photoviewer, and mastubatory aid (porn).
I guess I'm a retard
I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?
I can't imagine you'd want to be doing a lot of text input on it, would you?
This in mind, it seems to me the whole thing is a non-story. MS is now an also-ran in the phone biz, and has no footprint at all in the tablet market. Office or no office, it doesn't seem to matter.
Ah, Excel, the most abused piece of software in the world. Is there a problem for which it is the right solution?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Microsoft should put Office on "The LINUX"!
Office supports all kinds of scripting. Would Apple allow apps with such scripting support on it's app store? Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services? Unless they've changed pretty recently, I'm under impression that anything like that is a big no-no with Apple, apps which even hint at having that kind of functionality simply rejected.
If Apple would not make exception with MS, then the iDevice MS Office would be seriously crippled, so much so that MS might be right in deciding it does not want to do that. MS is trying to develop office into a broad online offering, and I could see how Apple would not accept that on their devices.
Of course there's a different controversy of just how much scripting should office application documents support in the first place, but I'll not get into that here...
Witch one will ween?
That actually sounds like someone talking about Apple more than Microsoft.
Truth is they just want MS Office on Apple products because tablets will continue to be irrelevant to a large part of the world unless they have those apps. Also, the people trying to use them for business think what's missing is Office, but when they get it, they'll be missing the keyboard too, and probably the mouse.
I remember reading about this a few months ago. The article is here.
Basically it is a very dumbed down version designed just to read office files on the go similiar to the pocket Office versions for WindowsCE of the past. They do not want adoption of IOS, but the pocket versions do encourage Windows and Office on desktop computer and kills smaller companies or Apple from getting a foothold in the market which would then threaten Windows.
MS has to be careful and walk a very fine line here. This would negate the reason to buy a Windows smart phone as the only reason people bothered with WindowsCE organizors over palm was the ability to read work documents. Now this gives a great reason for these executives and directors to buy an Iphone. Great now I can work on them too!
Office file formats are not going anyway. I got modded down here a few times saying I can't leave Office because I can not guarantee that my resume will look the same on someone elses computer running Office if I make it under LibraOffice. For that reason it will stay forever in business and MS Office is not going anyway as suppliers and customers will think you are incompentent if you send a document that looks funny on their computer.
So if I worked at MS I would only release Office for Windows 8 and Windows mobile and not care what Google and Apple do as I would have the ball no matter what.
http://saveie6.com/
I have the iWork apps on my iPad (and before that I relied on documents to go).
I rarely create new documents on my iPad, but I do a lot of editing, proof reading, and finalisation of documents that I then share, send on, present, etc. I consider myself highly productive on my iPad - even though I still have a notebook at my desk on which I will knock together complex presentations or spreadsheets, before iCloud syncs them onto my iPad where I will continue working on them or present them from using key note or numbers. In a typical day I spend about an hour or two in front of my notebook at my desk; and the rest of the day is spent on my iPad in meetings, workshops, waiting rooms, aeroplanes, etc.
I doubt that having Microsoft Office for the iPad will change the way I work, much. I suspect that there will be less fixing and tiding up of PowerPoint or Word documents that Keynote or Pages mangled during the conversion process. But I will still spend more than half my time on the iPad reading, editing, changing, commenting on spreadsheets, presentations and documents in collaboration with others and am unlikely to change the volume of material authored from scratch on the iPad itself just because I now have Office for the iPad.
'Microsoft's biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done.
Only on slashdot is Microsoft Office dying or not needed any more. Back in the real world; the place many here I'm sure must forget exists or something, Office 2010 is selling better than any other MS Office suite before - http://www.techspot.com/news/44268-microsoft-office-2010-turns-one-is-the-fastest-selling-version-ever.html.
MSFT aren't the evil machine they used to be, kids. Move on.....move on......
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsoft is not stupid. The future of office is not on the desktop, it is in the cloud. This is why they made Office 365, which works on any modern web browser, including the iPad.
There is not need for a "native app" for an office suite. If anything, just do what 50% of developers already to and wrap the website in a "native app" UI so that it shows up on the appstore.
Okay, I can understand wanting some kind of rudimentary spreadsheet viewing/editing application for tablet/mobile devices, but Excel is a particularly good example of a program that really needs a physical, full-size keyboard. There are numerous key combinations and shortcuts that are absolutely essential for efficient usage of Excel. If you're doing any kind of spreadsheet work, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, cursors, and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/F-number keys. Tapping an on-screen keyboard just isn't going to cut it, especially when that keyboard takes up valuable screen space that would otherwise be used to display more cells.
In a way, Excel is like Photoshop in that regard. Keyboard shortcuts are huge. These are applications that have evolved their present UI design to suit a desktop computing environment to the point where it would be incredibly cumbersome to adapt it to a tablet device with no mouse, no physical keyboard, and limited screen size. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but if you did actually manage to accomplish the task, users would almost have to completely relearn how to use the application. Nor am I saying that one should even attempt to design a full-featured version of Excel for tablet devices. My view is that tablets really are best suited for content consumption for most kinds of quantitative or visual data. It has nothing to do with whether we're talking about an iPad or some other tablet. The essence of what Excel does, and how the user creates spreadsheets in it, is something I don't think could translate well to such a device. And in light of this, I think the question of whether some incarnation of Office should be developed for iOS seems to be besides the point.
Microsoft need fear no "Office Alternative". If LibreOffice couldn't kill the inferior and more expensive Microsoft Office, after OpenOffice couldn't do it, after StarOffice and Word Perfect and LotusNotes or whatever Lotus' foray into a word processor was called, and KOffice, and on and on all the way back past Enable O/A, WordStar, and Format ][ couldn't stop the M$ Office juggernaut, how is an app for a stinking PAD going to do it? No one in his right mind would try to use a touchscreen to do any real typing. I want to hear of someone writing a 500+ page novel entirely on a stinking PAD, then editing it, etc.
Except those had to compete with MS Office, so they never gain market share.
On the iPad, on the other hand, people are forced to look for alternatives if they want to read office docs, instead of falling back to what they know. And that can be dangerous if they find that those same companies have desktop versions which are Good Enough and much cheaper.
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No one with an actual job is relying solely on post-pc devices to do their "real work".
Except of course the many that do.
Of course that doesn't mean that they don't also have a Mac or PC. Just that for at least part of their job, an iPad or an iPhone is the better tool.
With Microsoft's stock not performing for the last few years (a decade?) maybe Apple should just buy Microsoft with it's gigantic amount of cash ($100B and soaring!).
Not only would it guarantee, forever, Microsoft products on Apple platforms but it would enable Apple to completely dictate the future of the PC industry. Even Android would probably crumble, what use is your smartphone if your competitor controls ALL the PCs that you'd likely use it with? As well as providing a viable alternative to Google search?
Maybe that's why Apple's been saving its pennies. Can you think of a better use for (in a few years) a couple hundred billion dollars?
(Ok, ok, I know the regulatory agencies in all over the world will likely have some anti-trust issues with this. But it's a useful fantasy to see what Apple's cash hoard could be used for.)
Here's an interesting article that says Microsoft (pronounced 'Ballmer') missed the boat: http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss Tablets in general are proof that Microsoft Office is not 'required' to do useful work. So even if MS could jam Word into a tablet form-factor (e.g. memory and screen footprints), people are now realizing you don't need all that crap to write letters, reports, etc.
(As someone who once spent several months, full-time, evaluating word processors, this is not a surprise to me. MS Word is a mediocre product, in true Microsoft fashion it captured and locked in the market through sales and distribution, not through technical merit.)
By and large I agree with this, Office on the iPad would be great for editing existing documents - I share documents with dropbox to my ipad, sometimes it's just good to review something you've written on a different screen. Being able to edit on the ipad would be a distinct plus.
However... I just have this nagging suspicion that the future is going to end up looking like a network of devices. Streaming movies to apple TV from the ipad is a pretty satisfying experience, the bluetooth keyboard works just fine, but a case that let you snap a keyboard nto an ipad and make it feel like a laptop would be handy. I know, so why don't I just stick with my laptop? Maybe the answer is in the convenience of the ipad. At home I'll always turn to the ipad to pick up mails - just open the cover and it's there, never mind a 30 second start up. Make OSX more like iOS?
Any road up, Office for iOS: I'd vote yes.
The horses were not missed except by horse lovers. The keyboard will be missed by a lot of people, but not by those who don't use the device for work. Mostly though, I wanted to address the way the author called MS unimportant while missing the fact that Apple is in the exact same situation. Me - I run Linux and claimed people could just walk away from MS 10 years ago. Turns out that thinking overlooks a number of factors that keep users on a platform.
Does it even worth? Last time Borland put Delphi on Linux and became bankrupt! A very interesting costly project which never sold. Few percent market share does not worth the time of even a freelancer.
I have been a *NIX developer for years (linux, xenix, aix, smelly SCO and Netware which had an SDK very near to Unix) and I think only server software development worth on these OSes. We developed banking and network management software and both were very successful. But any desktop we did was a failure.
Exec responsible for Office sales: "An ipad port has the potential to send Office sales through the roof, especially if we price it reasonable enough to insure significant penetration."
Exec responsible for Windows sales: "Office is one of the driving factors in Windows sales."
Balmer: "No Office on the ipad. We will use it to drive sales of Windows 8 tablets."
Exec responsible for Office sales: "With all due respect, the company needs a product line to rely on once Windows declines. This could be a big opportunity to be relevant this decade."
Balmer: Throws a chair.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Academics are those whose mission is to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I’m not surprised many professors are entranced by tablet devices (iPads) given my own experience with them.
As a former academic who currently works in web development, I have an iPad and I wish wish WISH that I had had one when I had been a professor. I use a PDF reader (iAnnotate) that allows me to annotate PDFs, upload those PDFs to my desktop. From there I can (using custom PERL scripts) generate XML containing the content and metadata of those annotations, which XML objects I incorporate into an XML editor/viewer (Tinderbox) for editing, organizing, and HTML export. I bring the exported HTML into a CMS and publish that on the web. Between these pieces of software and hardware is ENORMOUS pedagogical potential
I know this because I had such a system in place as a faculty and students who hated Blackboard regularly commented how useful and more efficient my online course materials were. This was pre-tablet device (read pre-iPad), so I had been using a desktop program (open source Skim) to make these annotations. iAnnotate is a much more direct translation of book-reading skills and had iPads existed prior to my leaving academia for the Silicon Valley, I would have been using one, too.
tl;dr: I suspect that the "ooh shiny" professors have for tablet devices is actually the realization that touch devices are a paradigm shift from desktops, a paradigm with its own set of advantages and possibilities. Faculty buy into these things not because they are easily distracted but because they have a researcher’s curiosity for useful technologies.
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WTF for? I mean, who is going to use it? Who would ever pay for it? Why would I want it? Maybe Suse would put it in a default installation, but I haven't used Suse in a long time either.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Don't we already have enough ported, legacy bullshit for Linux and iPad? I know people feel like they're addicted to office, but they're not. They get by just fine without it. Windows tablets will flounder in the market this year and next, and then Microsoft will probably do something idiotic like port office. Then, I'm sure that there will be a couple of people who buy the ported version of office, but as usual, it will be too little, too late from Microsoft. The biggest problem the company has is how fat and complacent they have been through all of this. Windows could have ruled the world of mobile if they had been a little more forward thinking a little earlier in the game. They should have thought about phones and tablets before Apple. There was no reason not to. And while I think rumors of the death of the PC might be premature, I think they missed the boat on mobile, and it will be a lot more difficult for them to catch up.
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