Slashdot Mirror
Office 2013: Microsoft Cloud Era Begins In Earnest
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.
Pass.
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).
Even if I felt the need for a new version of Office, i will be avoiding cloud apps just as I did in the 90s when they where first tried. Frankly, there is big enough problem with applications (games for the most part) requiring an internet connect already without putting the whole thing out there. Even if we ignore the security issues, I dont want to have to be online inorder to work on a document.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Right, I can see from my window the droves of users moving from Windows to Linux (or even Mac).
Finally, the year of the Linux desktop is here.
Footnote: Win8 probably has more market share than Linux now by now.
none
1) How long will I have access to my documents? According to current documentation for enterprises and small business:
When a subscription is removed, all data is permanently lost.
http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/En-ca/office365-enterprises/hh143495.aspx
http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365-smallbusinesses/hh143522.aspx
2) Subscribers get an additional 20GB in Skydrive. What happens to my documents if I am using 100% of Skydrive (including the additional 20GB)? Is there a grace period?
They don't make it easy to find the information to these questions. The answers are likely the same for any other cloud service that provides a free and paid offering but why do we have to guess.
...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.
Many production networks never see the cloud, or a least no connection to the Microsoft cloud.
Just so people are aware, it looks like there is still a boxed version of Office 2013, so companies which cannot rely on cloud software and services can still use Office 2013.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
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.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
No, those are the homeless people.
The people switching to Linux are all in their basements, so you can't see them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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. 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.
Its not what it is, its something else.
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.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Tell that to Carmen Ortiz...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Actually Microsoft's cloud services are HIPAA compliant. According to the article, it includes Office365 in addition to Azure. Link: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/Microsoft-Adds-HIPAA-Compliance-in-Windows-Azure-for-Cloud-Health-Data-446671/
$100 a year is way too much for the average home user. I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 for around $70 at the student pricing when I was in college. I have been using the same copy since. So far the price per year has been $70 / 6 years = $11.67/year. That assumes I will buy a new copy sometime this year which I most likely will not. $5 to $10 a year would be more reasonable. Since graduating, my average usage of Microsoft Office at home is probably under 10 hours per year.
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.
"The Windows Division once more becomes the company's biggest money-maker."
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Math? 10,000 years old (at-least)
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.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
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 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
Phrases like "home user" mislead the geek, I think.
"Software for the professional working at home and abroad" would be closer to the truth for a product like Office. Everyone in the family may be using the program --- in part because they share the same interests and ambitions.
But for him, it is one of the fundamental tools of his trade.
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.
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.