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MS Office Tablet Delay Gives Google a Real Chance, and Not Just Google Apps
rtfa-troll writes "Microsoft Office slideware for iOS and Android has been resisting many migrations to Google Apps. Although a number of the largest companies, from KLM to Disney, have already moved to Google Apps, most large companies are still using Microsoft Office heavily. The majority of current Google users are smaller businesses. Now Microsoft has been forced to admit that its office suite for Android will be delayed by at least a year and Zdnet tells us that Google will be the big winner from that. However, they also say QuickOffice, rather than Google Apps, will be the main winner. Other Android app suites will benefit too, though currently the Android version of LibreOffice is only available as a dev build for sideloading and is having some difficulties packaging for Google Play, so it may not benefit from this delay unless more volunteers step up to help. Microsoft relies heavily on Office for revenue, so this may represent a real, long-term threat to the company."
Is Google introducing some type of "uncloud" feature for Google Docs?
I like Google Docs but it sucks having confidential business materials out in the cloud somewhere.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
there are dozens in the iOS app store. Pages is the closest thing to word and some are nothing more than text editors.
either way you don't need the entire MS Office on a mobile device. just a few features to use on the road or train
either way you don't need the entire MS Office on a mobile device. just a few features to use on the road or train
That works well when commuting within a city, but it breaks down when taking several hours to travel between cities in different states/provinces. That's why I still carry a 10" laptop.
I use Kingsoft on my tablet, and it works ok. I've been able to develop a powerpoint, read documents and even edit lightly some documents. It has some cloud integration but also keeps documents on the tablet. Now on my phone I use Google drive, mainly because I have an old smartphone and don't have the resources to load another application. So what does slashdot use?
Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally wo
But really there's no difference between QuickOffice being the "winner" over Google Apps, since Google owns them both:
http://www.quickoffice.com/google_acquires_quickoffice/
In my experience, Zoho Docs is years ahead of Google Docs. Very few columnists talk about it but it's the only serious "office for web" I would consider for my business. It does everything Google Docs, Hangouts, Drive, etc do, plus a few more things.
One of the nice things about an onscreen keyboard is that they can be customized for the task at hand, thus the spreadsheet keyboard in Numbers for iPad. Now imagine a keyboard with C O H S P + - 1 2 3 4 5 6 and a subscript superscript lock button.
A really really dumb idea. Its one of those areas where people need to comprehend what a tablet is good and not good at. Reading office documents is viable, but actually doing office level work? No no no.
We`re all equal
Microsoft has more or less relied on Office and upgrades of Windows for years for revenue, and have for the most part kept it as a Windows-only piece.
As other office suites come along, and other OSes as well, Microsoft seems to be now finding themselves trying to remain relevant.
Would most people with an Android tablet even *want* Microsoft Office for it? It seems that if you wanted the full Microsoft experience, you'd have bought one of their tablets. And if you didn't want the Microsoft experience, you won't be looking for this software.
I don't really see Microsoft as a company who really innovates -- I'm hard pressed to think of a single product which Microsoft invented/pioneered, and which is what people want.
The OS took years to catch up to what others were already doing. Office is certainly a feature rich mature piece of software, but many of us don't find ourselves needing Excel and PowerPoint in our non-work lives. Moving the Start button or some of the changes lately have been mostly decorative and not revolutionary.
The Kinect is neat, but like so many products someone else innovated and Microsoft purchased.
A late delayed release of Office for Android? I suspect there's an awful lot of yawns which accompany that news.
As to innovating anything new and groundbreaking, we'll see if Microsoft ever does that. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples, current or past, of stuff that they've released which was truly 'new' and lasting -- mostly it's been clones of products other companies have already been shipping, and many of them weren't exactly huge successes (like the Zune for instance).
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The prevailing opinion seems to be that mobile apps only need to "support" a subset of features, and that's fine for authoring from scratch. But when you edit existing documents, it can break or drop unsupported features.
For a random example, take http://docbox.etsi.org/usergroup/usergroup/70-drafts/00019/etsi_dtr00019v113.doc. LibreOffice mucks up the first two pages. The version of Polaris Office in my tab just crashes.
The (sad) alternative right now is RDP/VNC into a real PC and struggle with virtual mice and whatnot. You will likely have to do it for other apps anyway.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Microsoft Office is probably even more popular than Windows itself.
Those who use LibreOffice or any other variants, for the most part, come back to Microsoft Office.
Especially when they have to work with complex documents.
So, while the perception is that Microsoft will be losing market share over Google Apps for mobile devices, the truth is, unless Google Apps come to be on-par with Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.., then the moment Office is an option for Android/iOS, it will grab some of the market share back.
That's for the casual users anyways.
Some of the deciding factor towards losing market share comes from companies and corporations who are in the market for a platform for their offices. They can purchase Google Apps and install it on their servers, which has pros and cons, or stick with Microsoft, which has pros and cons.
To me, that's the market share Microsoft could be losing, if these companies have requirements for mobile tablets for their employees for their Android and iOS devices, they may favor Google Apps now, which will be an investment and for which the odds of rolling back to Microsoft will be slight to none.
Google will be the big winner from that. However, they also say QuickOffice, rather than Google Apps, will be the main winner. Other Android app suites will benefit too.
Oh, I get it. This is in an alternate universe where Android tablets are winning.
Microsoft just seems totally disconnected from the market and their customer base. Once again it seems to me as if they want "everything" but cannot focus on "one good thing", whether it be an OS, Office, Phone, Media player, Gamming Console or whatever. Instead of controlling everything, focus on something and make it really, really awesome that your customer base cannot live without. If not, prepare for irrelevance, kind of like what happened to Novell in the 90s (remember that one MS).
This is another contender that has not been mentioned yet. Softmaker's file format filters are excellent. No iOS support though as of yet.
I think the market is really there for the very small organizations (we're moving lots of folks to Google apps - if they have 4 people in the office it's not hard) and for the very largest organizations that have the clout to enforce change from the top down and do their own software in house, but I don't foresee the midsize businesses changing over from Office any time soon. It's integrated into certain ERP applications - for example, the medical software SRS relies on Excel and has a toolbar built right in. Getting software vendors to change their ways is going to be required before those mid size businesses can even consider breaking off the Microsoft teat.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I still view it (other than short e-mails) as a content consumption device, not a content creation device... even if it had a snap-on keyboard.
There is one type of content creation a tablet could in theory be good for, namely anything requiring a pen. We all still use lots of pens so the need is obviously there. A tablet could be great for drawing and note taking (think equations or diagrams which are nearly impossible on a keyboard or with fingers) if the interface was done right. There is a reason most students still take notes on paper. Problem is that we are stuck finger-painting on our tablets which doesn't work for those purposes. A tablet should be the perfect device for students to take notes on but no one makes them right now with that task in mind. A tablet could be a great content creation device for the right applications.
The problem with using a stylus on a tablet is that the software designers invariably and wrongly try to use the stylus for navigation or as a keyboard instead of just using it for what it is actually good for which is ONLY drawing. The fact that you can draw alpha-numerics or point at navigation buttons is just a bonus but they get all excited and try to use the stylus for things it does do well. They (historically) have tried to use a stylus like a mouse pointer which demonstrably doesn't work well since the interfaces were designed for keyboards/mice combos. Or they try to turn it into a keyboard for text input which doesn't work either (too slow and character recognition generally sucks). A stylus/pen is for drawing and only for drawing. Even interfaces which are designed for fingers don't really translate well to a pen - pens are for drawing thin lines, not pushing buttons. You don't (typically) use a pen to push a button when you hold a real pen so why would you do it on a tablet?
I'm not a MS-basher, (typing this on my Win7 PC running MS Office; works very well, and needs to, because all my corporate customers send me...MS Office docs...and no, sorry, whilst I have LibreOffice installed, and think it's great, there's plenty of documents I receive that it just won't work/display as the author intended. Idem for Pages etc. on my iDevices).
Anyway, MS have tons of cash, and presumably plenty of talented people, but they seem to be playing 'catch-up' all the time; perhaps they are influenced by their "closed/NIH" mentality. (Reminds me of when I was working with IBM in the 1980s & 90s- they reacted to the 'opening' of the PC architecture they created by trying to 're-close' it with the PS/2; yeah, that worked well).
Once the genie is out of the bottle, then the game has changed, and you need to change with it. It's no longer good enough to try and 'punish' other platforms by denying them MS Office. (For this is the real reason for Office non-availability on Android etc., make no mistake. "Don't want to buy our Windows OS? Well f*ck you buddy, you're obviously not looking for 'enterprise-level' software, and good luck with LibreOffice running your weird XL macros and PPTs!")
Sure, PCs will always have a role, especially for heavy content creation, but where the heck is MS Office for iOS, Linux (Yeah,yeah, WINE, I know, but that's missing the point) and Android? You can bet your ass that if MS Office was run as a separate company, they would not be taking *years* to get their products out on these platforms where penetration is high and growing.
In the meantime, I'm sure Google and others will soon get their act together and we'll (finally!) have seemless document creation & modification across platforms.
I can't wait, and I'm sure I'm not alone. This would knock a far bigger nail into MS's coffin than the supposed 'failure' of Windows 8.
(Oh yeah, while you're at it G-men, can we have a 100%-compatible substitue for Outllook, please?)
All software cost (a lot) of money to develop, one way or another. However, like most IP, across time the value of the IP tends to fall to zero. In the IT world, this factor is (sometimes) countered by the need for the software to be continuously updated to take advantages in hardware improvements, or to support new standards in file types.
Sooner or later, computers reach the point of 'good enough' for a given task. This has happened to the OS and certainly to office apps. Worse even for those that which to make money by selling such products, a legion of open-source developers take advantage of the stability to create 'free' versions of such software, where 'free' is the initial 'price', not the effective price because of ageing.
Put simply, by now Microsoft's Office apps, OSes, and development products should all by 'free'. By now, Microsoft should be making its money from 'services'. This isn't the case, and likely it is too late for Microsoft to successfully migrate to the correct business strategy. All MS can do is use FUD and a legion of paid shills to push the idea that paying a fortune to use Office still makes sense.
Of course, unlike in the browser space, Microsoft's Office competitors have been largely incompetent up to now. Big open source projects tend to attract very poor but very enthusiastic programmers who spam the project with hyper-abstracted programming models. In other words, code that needs processors hundreds of times more powerful than if C/C++ was used for ALL the heavy lifting. Code that needs tens of times more RAM than if proper memory management and other proper algorithms were used. Current versions of Firefox and Libre Office are both horrific nightmares for any other than simple use on powerful hardware for these reasons.
Android is changing everything. To the metal programming is back in fashion on the new platforms, even though they now have the same CPU/GPU/RAM facilities as a perfectly good desktop Wintel PC. The reason for this is summed up in one word- 'battery'. Crappy coding means vastly more power use. Google NEEDS very good coding on the Android and ChromeOS platforms.
Now I may seem to have changed the subject, but haven't. Google has just forked Webkit because the open-source project was crap. We are now seeing the important open-source projects being targeted by proper programmers who will NOT tolerate the use of languages that are interpreters running on interpreters running on interpreters just so hopeless enthusiasts can contribute WITHOUT learning how to code properly by using the putrid mickey-mouse languages that have arisen as the Internet grew.
Microsoft's products are terrible compared to the time, effort and cost Microsoft spent creating them, but they do tend to be better than the current free alternatives. However, now Google and others desire to make open-source 'grow up', this situation will change very quickly indeed. Microsoft cannot improve its game- its best versions of Office and Visual Studio are now more than 10 years ago. Current MS products contain the same dreadful abstracted interpreted language bloat that requires a quad core CPU, and 8GB of RAM to give the same performance 2 much slower cores, and 1GB of RAM gave years ago. If anything, Microsoft is certain to release WORSE versions of its key products in the future (either more resource hungry, or horribly crippled ARM versions).
Intel is DEAD because no-one has a sane reason to continue paying the Intel-tax, and without the Intel-tax, Intel cannot compete. In the same way, why should anyone pay the Microsoft-tax (the selling price of its software products), when the free alternatives will soon be as good or better? Of course, we all think MS could have a future in services, finally eliminating IT departments in most companies, and moving the same onto the cloud. The age of the thin-client, per-seat cloud licence is finally possible and probably desirable (long after Sun attempted to 'own' this market) but Microsoft is run by retarded repulsive s**t-head
While I use Google docs / Libre Office for personal stuff all the time and can't justify the cost of MS Office for personal use, you are going to require expensive third party software and more complex management to meet PCI / FIPS / SOX / etc... for the corporate world to migrate to Google Docs environment. Sure its let another chink in Microsoft's armor, but I wouldn't be holding off for the going out of business sale from this.
I'm not up on the lingo the kids are using these days. What the dick is 'slideware'? Is that to do with using your smartphone as a puck on an air-hockey table?
I still don't get it for content creation and access where you need web access.
What the cloud delivers the cloud can take away; deliberately or otherwise.
These aren't published formats. Everything is guesswork, so you can't be 100% compatible. And MS raises the bar instead of publishing anything helpful. So no, you'll never get MS Office XLS/X 100% compatible or MS Outlook 100% (what does that mean anyway, Exchange compatible?). Go with other standards like OpenDocument, PDF, etc and Groupware*(zimbra, open x-change).
*from osalt.com
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.
Isn't "slideware" a reference to PowerPoint, not the whole Office suite?
How does software "resist a migration"?
Quick Office standing a chance? I'm sorry to say but Google isn't known to be a good executor. Besides, if Microsoft maintains the speed of its suite's ever moving file formats, Google's suite doesn't stand a chance.
Sorry, I had to say it as it is.
You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.
I appreciate the suggestion but I very much remain dubious they will get it "right". While I don't have anything against those features they are superfluous. Someone needs to get drawing and note taking right. It should work very much like writing on a paper note pad and be very easy to use. Every pen implementation I've seen so far gets carried away with handwriting recognition and other theoretically nifty features (which rarely work very well) but don't make just writing/drawing easy which is the bit that actually matters. It's more important that *I* be able to write and recognize what I wrote than the computer. I remain hopeful but so far every attempt I've seen has fallen badly short.
In fact, the note series does let you just scribble or doodle or whatever. The handwriting and formulae recognition is a feature you need to tap to activate.