Microsoft Makes Office Mobile Editing Free As in Freemium

An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today announced a significant change to its Office strategy for mobile devices: creating and editing is now free. The company also released standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPhone, as well a new preview of these apps for Android tablets. Starting today, whether you're using an Office app on Android or iOS, you can create and edit content without an Office 365 subscription. The company is pitching this move as "More of Office for everyone."

Comments

I am impressed

[iamacat]

The company is trying something new. It may or may not work out for them, but if they keep exploring, they are bound to find something that succeeds. That, and the effort to really understand user needs through Windows 10 preview, tells me that there may be some how for MS to capture back some of their former success.

Re:I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

By "finding something new", you mean copying what Google has had available for some time now.

No he didn't even write "finding something new" so what are you quoting? He wrote "trying something new" and for Microsoft this is something new, this isn't just a web app in a container like Google Docs for iOS is, it is native productivity applications designed specifically for mobile platforms other than their own and offered free of charge.

Even if this were somebody elses idea what is this obsession with disparaging people for copying good ideas? Nobody should have a monopoly on ideas. There seems to be an obsession with "being first" even if you do a shit job of it, just look at the state of Samsung's "innovations" these days in an effort to beat Apple to the punch, it's all about being first rather than being any good.

Re: I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really a disparagement, it's just an illustration of how behind-the-times and uncreative Microsoft is. Just another sign of a dying dinosaur...

Re:I am impressed

[stephanruby]

The company is trying something new. It may or may not work out for them, but if they keep exploring, they are bound to find something that succeeds.

They're not trying something new. They're just trying to keep up with the free competing alternatives.

...for MS to capture back some of their former success.

This strategy isn't going to win them any new marketshare. At best, it may prevent them from losing more marketshare.

In either case, people will still think of Microsoft Office 365 as a paid-only service. Similar things happened with Hotmail and Bing. Eventually, Hotmail and Bing matched Gmail and Google in terms of quality of their features, but this change took so long to happen, it didn't improve their marketshare despite all the money they spent in marketing and advertising.

Re:I am impressed

[barc0001]

I think OP meant "new for Microsoft"

Re:I am impressed

[exomondo]

In either case, people will still think of Microsoft Office 365 as a paid-only service.

It is a paid-only service isn't it? These new programs are free but they aren't office 365.

Re:I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why it it so highly moderated? It's basically just "me too" sycophantism.

Re:I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much disparaging people for copying good ideas as just pointing out that this is Microsoft's standard operating procedures --- copy somebody else's good ideas, because Microsoft doesn't have any of their own good ideas. It's not shocking or surprising that Microsoft would copy Google .. *badly* at that.

Linus Torvalds won

[Anonymous Coward]

'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' -- Linus Torvalds

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[segedunum]

Yer, it's not the beginning of then end but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

Office functionality should be helping to sell Microsoft's phone thingies, but they aren't.

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[Anonymous Coward]

Won what?

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[LinuxIsGarbage]

'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' -- Linus Torvalds

Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[drinkypoo]

Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"

You can once you install a debian environment. And you can have GNU and X, too, although most of the X servers are pretty poor.

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[Kjella]

Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"

Well, Linus never agreed that much with the FSF in the first place which is quite evident in many debates like over GPLv3. He wants to build the best kernel ever and if somebody else does something smart he'd like to study it and incorporate it into his project which is his interest in copyleft. Whether it's locked down for the end user to alter or not or if it's used to run open or closed source software isn't really any of his concern, while he picked GPL as his license he's never supported the four freedoms that RMS based it on. His ultimate victory would probably be more like Microsoft and Apple ditching their own kernel in favor of Linux so you'd have Windows/Linux, OS X/Linux, Android/Linux and GNU/Linux. Or really any variety that runs on top of his kernel.

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[Air-conditioned cowh]

More like if Norton, McAffee and other bloatware manufaturers also make applications for Linux that PC World aggressively ram down the throat of anyone trying to buy a PC, then Linux has taken over. Because its only that additional bloatware that actually gives places like PC World any profit at all and an insentive to sell PCs. I wouldn't be surprised if the PC itself was sold at a loss.

MS Office is definitely one of the apps places like PC World try to push at the checkout.

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not necessarily OS X, since it's based on a free/open-source BSD-like kernel.

Re:Linus Torvalds won

[tibit]

I'd have thought that not using X is a benefit, not a shortcoming. It's an antiquated design that had its time and place, but doesn't anymore.

Broken on 4.4.4

[Indy1]

Unable to install it on my new Droid Turbo. Other people in forums reporting the same.

Smooth move M$

Re:Broken on 4.4.4

[Anonymous Coward]

One must read before speaking..."The integration will arrive for Android phones in a âoecouple of weeks,â Lefebvre told VentureBeat. Beta participants for the Android tablet program can expect the functionality as well."

subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

without an Office 365 subscription

Subscription? To a.... word processor?

What foul sorcery is this?

Re:subscription??

[xaotikdesigns]

Subscription to the full office suite for five computers with free upgrades to the latest version, cloud storage, and a few other features. Still sucks, but it's a bit better than just a subscription to a word processor

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

> cloud storage, and a few other features

You say that as if it's a good thing...

Re:subscription??

[kesuki]

SAAS is no new idea... see there was this unix protocol called gopher and it summoned documents to the users through a data network... and gasp you didn't need to move paper around to get your data. sadly a software known as a 'browser' came along and you could traverse a network called the world wide web. it had links to this new paperless data at the low low price of $9.95 a month for 10 hours a month at 9660 baud... well actually to be correct the price was all paid for by schools which then upgraded their prices to reflect this, but 'aol' was the way home users could connect for the above terms.

while in those early days you used a floppy to infect the AOL malware nowadays it is nearly extinct, and they haven't sent me a worthless cd in many long years now. at least the floppy could be formatted and reused. so yes software as a service dates back to AOL who offered a software portal to this data network as a 'service' and allowed users to compromize their data at $1.95 an hour.

buzzwords are usually a way people pass off other peoples ideas as their own or as a new way of doing the same old same old.

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

SAAS is no new idea... see there was this unix protocol called gopher and it summoned documents to the users through a data network...

gopher is not SaaS.

sadly a software known as a 'browser' came along and you could traverse a network called the world wide web.

a browser is also not SaaS.

so yes software as a service dates back to AOL who offered a software portal to this data network as a 'service' and allowed users to compromize their data at $1.95 an hour.

no that was not software as a service.

buzzwords are usually a way people pass off other peoples ideas as their own or as a new way of doing the same old same old.

or rather people such as yourself who think you understand what it means incorrectly apply it to things that are totally different. we have this thing that you have likely never heard of called wikipedia that can help you to learn about terms like SaaS so you don't go off foolishly complaining about something you don't understand.

it is quite incredible that on a site like this there are people who dont understand a term like SaaS and also refuse to look it up and educate themselves so instead just come up with their own silly definition of what they think it means and start talking about it as if that were its actual definition. perhaps you should provide us your definition of SaaS because your post demonstrates categorically that your definition is not the same as the widely understood industry one.

Re:subscription??

[kesuki]

i will read your fine links, and correct you where you are wrong.

"Software as a service (SaaS; pronounced /sæs/ or /sÉ'Ës/[1]) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.[2][3] It is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software".[4] SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser."

This is the definition of america online word for word as it existed in 1994. i kid you not. you installed aol to your windows 3.11 machine from the disc which then puled the data from the 'cloud' of aol's server (i know they didn't call software downloads the cloud either but as i see it aol was the first cloud computer as well) once the client loaded it would offer you games, chat, icons, a dictionary ,a wide array of applications, a search engine that could search everything aol had built. it was called keywords, but that was not the initial name for it. by then aol had devolved to simple browser software, which is still a popular mode for software as a service. due to the high cost of system time developers were encouraged to have offline mode but most of the games were online only. most importantly though all the appilactions required aol software to run, and when the company tried to seppuku they switched to browsers, leaving many people without the software they had aquried online and would not be on any other users computer unless it was downloaded. when they killed it off infavor of buying netscape and only having the browser based tools it lost it's magic. ok i read most of the wiki and it perfectly matches everything aol has ever done stupid or smart. i think you thought aol was just a dialup internet stripped down. even compuserv had qute a few similarities to aol though compuserv had a lot less stuff than aol had at the time.

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his point is that gopher is not SaaS and neither is the browser and while AOL did provide some software through its service this was just offering licensed software for download and execution on the user's machine, which is not Software as a Service.

Re: subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

i will read your fine links, and correct you where you are wrong.

Damn, 90% of social interaction on the Internet boiled down semantically into one sentence.

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

ok so you have at least admitted you're wrong in your application of SaaS to gopher and browsers, that's good. but you have drawn conclusions by only reading the first 2 sentences of the page.

with regard to AOL: that was not SaaS, those applications did not run on a centrally located server, they were just programs that were downloaded and executed on users systems. Just because a program running on a user's machine pulls data from another source on a network, which is exactly what AOL's software did, does not make it Software as a Service.

Re:subscription??

[JWSmythe]

Ya.. I never get the hype, or the demands. People are willing to spend lots of money, and even more time, arguing about what thing you can write a letter with is better.

It's not like that's a growing technology. It puts letters on a page, sometimes with some graphics. I'd like to introduce them to Mr. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. He had some ideas in that area.

Re: subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wildly overestimating. At least 90% don't read the links.

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the future. Now the software companies get the license fee paid yearly which also includes that they get the user's data into their servers. The data users produced can be then harvested and sold to anyone who is willing to pay. You are not anymore buying a product, you are a product who pays yearly fee to get exploited.

Re:subscription??

[Anonymous Coward]

it had links to this new paperless data at the low low price of $9.95 a month for 10 hours a month at 9660 baud...

No, it absolutely did not. One could not achieve 9600 Baud on the POTS lines those modems were used on. They were 2400 Baud using QAM to achieve 9600 BPS, without getting into the differences used by HST and other proprietary techniques used to get the faster data rates prior to the 9600 bps standards being established.

Re:subscription??

[kesuki]

"I think his point is that gopher is not SaaS and neither is the browser and while AOL did provide some software through its service this was just offering licensed software for download and execution on the user's machine, which is not Software as a Service."

by that definition, the first telnet programs on remote unix hardware was the first SAAS. since you had to have remote access to run programs it was all run on the mainframe and not everyone had access. for that matter then cgi-bin also was SaaS.

Re:subscription??

[xaotikdesigns]

What exactly is wrong with cloud storage? You complain as though you have no idea how to use cloud storage. It's not for your nudes or keeping the secret recipe for KFC, but if they did indeed bump it to unlimited storage as an earlier article stated, I would lvoe to be able to back up my terabytes of video files and music. I would also love if where I saved them to was easily accessible from any desktop or mobile device. But I guess I'm just crazy like taht.

I want to make micropayments!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So will I have to pay 25 cents to use the font I want? How about 50cents to save it in a compatible format. I"m sure I'll be doing lots of typing of papers on my phone.

Re:I want to make micropayments!!!

[geminidomino]

I"m sure I'll be doing lots of typing of papers on my phone.

Hey, you never know. November is NaNoWriMo, after all...

Re:I want to make micropayments!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea. What if the freemium version of Excel only supported entering numbers from 0 to 6, and user could buy the rest? The Word could have the bold and italics styles, perhaps even save and print-button as DLC.

Required to stay relevant

[merick]

I don't think this was so much of a desire to be innovative as it is to survive. With good-enough editors available on mobile devices, web services, and PCs, MS has to move down-market or risk entire new generations never using or needing their Office software.

As it is, my daughter in middle-school has had some Office required assignments which prompted angry parent responses. I spoke with several other tech-oriented parents with kids at the school and none of them have MS Office at home. They all use either LibreOffice, OpenOffice or Apple's iWorks.

Microsoft is battling obsolescence. This is a good attempt to reach a generation that doesn't know or care about them.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[xaotikdesigns]

Agreed, for most people, Google Docs will handle pretty much everything you'll need.

I do run into the occasional issue where I have to hop over to Word or Excel when I'm done to finish up some formatting, but in general, I'm google docs all the way

Re:Required to stay relevant

[tlhIngan]

I don't think this was so much of a desire to be innovative as it is to survive. With good-enough editors available on mobile devices, web services, and PCs, MS has to move down-market or risk entire new generations never using or needing their Office software.

The real irony is that Office for iPad worked better as a touch-screen Office than Office did. Anyone who tried to use Office on their Surface RT or Surface found out quickly that touchscreens poorly replicate a mouse and keyboard.

And yet, Microsoft has a product for tablets that's usable on a touchscreen.

And there's a bit of survival to it too - Microsoft actually has in-app purchasing for o365 subscriptions. Yes, they're actually giving Apple 30%. (Though, you could probably make the case that Apple's cut of 30% isn't all too different from selling o365 subscription gift cards at Best Buy and all those places - Best Buy etc. have to make money off them too).

Re:Required to stay relevant

[fat_mike]

How many is "several"?

Re:Required to stay relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is absolutely silly. Microsoft Office is growing hugely, Microsoft is reporting record earnings and growing as a company. It isn't about survival, its about competing. If you're looking for a company in survival mode, seek out Sony.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you. Funny how truthful message such as yours (and in moments, my message) get voted down on /.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree except they are not battling obsolescence, they are battling the image they've cultivated over the years of shitting all over their users. They could invent the most impressive piece of software in the entire world tomorrow and a lot of people would STILL go out of their way to find an alternative.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[cbhacking]

The difference, of course, being that Surfaces and such support keyboards and mice (well, trackpads on the keyboard covers, but you can also use a Bluetooth or USB mouse). Nonetheless, you're right that *for touchscreen use specifically* desktop Office is pretty bad. It's not unusable - I don't have super-tiny fingers yet I don't find the buttons on the ribbon very hard to hit - but it's a definitely inferior experience. Of course, since Office for RT is just an ARM recompile of their x86 code, and runs in the desktop mode on all Win8 systems be they RT or not, this shouldn't come as any surprise.

There is a touchscreen-focused version of OneNote for Win8 / Windows RT "Metro" mode, though.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[tibit]

Many schools are switching to Google services, and you have 8 year olds swapping work through Google Drive, working on their documents there, etc. This is, in fact, marvellous - it took someone the size of Google to make it happen, and happen it did. It's like science-fiction from the vievpoint of myself back in the elementary school. Back then I had a home network with intelligent terminals of various sorts (low-end PCs, some Z80-based systems, etc), and had strung some cable to a few neighbor kids and got my dad to grudgingly agree to loan some hardware out to them. Eventually I had a multiuser editor written, but it wasn't anything breathtaking - never mind that all the hardware was not something anyone would want to carry around. Nowadays you can get a decent Android tablet for $100 (a bit more in a brick-and-mortar store), and you can collaborate on stuff anytime, anywhere, as long as there's connectivity. And we can image protoplanetary disks. Interesting times to live in, really.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[david_thornley]

All tablets I'm familiar with support keyboards. Microsoft just pushed them in advertising so it might look to the dim-witted like Microsoft was doing something new and exciting, and then charged extra for them to try to get more money out of the customer.

Re:Required to stay relevant

[david_thornley]

Microsoft is fighting obsolescence. They're just being smarter than some other companies and fighting it while things are still going well for them. If they let things go as they're going, they'll wind up in an IBM-type situation, dominating a niche market (mainframes for IBM), still profitable but hardly dominant.

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick and tired of feminism being shoved down my throat on every single issue. I mean, aren't there other, perhaps more important, issues out there?

Oh yeah, I hear ya.

It's almost as annoying as someone who can't stay on fucking topic...

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[xaotikdesigns]

I'm debating what I should have for dinner. The girlfriend has offered to make either Curry or Breakfast for Dinner... Which do you think I should go for?

Sounds like a good freemium model

[Krishnoid]

Starting today, whether you're using an Office app on Android or iOS, you can create and edit content without an Office 365 subscription.

"I see you're trying to save the document you've created and edited. Would you like help in subscribing to Office 365?"

Re:Sounds like a good freemium model

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh - and your document is guarandeed completely incompatible with those dirty commie free Non-Microsoft trash applications...

Come to daddy Microsoft, and you will rewarded by paying only an discount price....

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

... without an Office 365 subscription

An 'office mobile' account is still required. It is just free for personal use.

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[juanfgs]

Should I buy a Tesla next year?

You've typed three sentences!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your energy has been depleted. Please wait 15 minutes for it to recharge, or share your writing with your friends or pay $2.95 for additional energy.

Recently for work (legacy code and server config that I inherited), I had to test a fix FOR MOBILE STUPIDITY. I had to do it without releasing it to the wild (they're anal about untested releases) but I have no access to my working copy via wifi because it's not part of the intranet. Making a super secret carbon copy of the live site would be more trouble than it's worth. And we have no USB cables available to try the remote console thing in Chrome. So I had to do the testing by applying it as a hotfix (jquery event handler) via the developer console.

The entire ordeal instantly became the single most excruciatingly frustrating and cumbersome bit of coding I've ever had to do, thanks in part to mobile I/O word processors.

Finding the developer console for those garbage mobile browsers was futile. Entering javascript:code... commands into the address bar worked, but that shit doesn't get added to history or predictions and I don't want to retype that shit over and over.

On the built-in app screen, not a single thing that had an appropriate looking icon was a fucking text editor. I didn't want to go installing random text apps on it because I borrowed the thing from family (our company isn't hip(ster) enough to be doing shit on tablets, and the dinky smart phones people have... no thanks).

I had to look through every single built-in app to find a word processor. Ended up finding one and it did NOT have a clearly identifiable icon because it was a jack of all trades office suite. Getting past the pre-made template shit to get just a blank slate to work from was also necessary... WHY? And of course, the keyboard. Oh... but I only needed to type something brief...

javascript:$('#a_select2_dropdown').on('change select2-close',function() { $('input').blur(); });

(To prevent the onscreen keyboard from appearing AFTER selecting an option and seeing the dropdown close)

Well shit. Now I'm going back and forth from the alphabet, symbols and MORE symbols modes of the onscreen keyboard, hunting and pecking like a fucking grandpa. Then the issue of my giant man hands being completely fucking unable to consistently activate the highlighting or drag the selection grips to the extents to copy that shit. Where the fuck is select all?

Who seriously wants to use that trash technology for anything other than dicking around in a munchkin game or browsing the internet. Work? On mobile devices. Are people fucking retarded? And using FREEMIUM apps?!?! BWAHAHAAAHAHAAAHAHAHAAHAAHA. People like that deserve to be nickel and dimed.

Re:You've typed three sentences!

[tibit]

You could have used a bluetooth or even a wired USB keyboard with it. Just so that you know. It'd work out of the box, even on iOS (through the camera connection kit). A coworker who uses a browser-based IDE on his Galaxy this-or-that has hooked up this monster to his tablet. Good that he's young and has good eyesight :) He plugs it in through a gender bender (adapter).

All maximized all the time

[tepples]

I'm willing to accept Android as a separate Linux userland that does not use X11. But it is missing one key feature that most X11 window managers provide. If I have a tablet with four times the pixels and four times the physical space of a phone, I ought to be able to split the screen and run four phone apps. But Google deliberately does not provide for this, instead mandating in the Android CDD that apps run maximized all the time. Either an application's screen size is set in stone at installation time or the device isn't allowed to have Google Play Store. As far as I can tell, Samsung's multi-window mode just zooms out on an existing full-screen view, which can make text unreadably small.

Re:All maximized all the time

[exomondo]

And we just end up with hacks like Samsung's to get around that limitation because stretching phone apps to tablet size is a horrible experience, better to have them run at their native resolution than stretch them out or - as you say - run them windowed. Though swipe-from-edge gestures could be problematic unless you have some more explicit way than just a tap to change focus between windows.

Re: All maximized all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. I'm using multi window right now to type this while watching a youtube vid and it works great.

Re: All maximized all the time

[tepples]

I've been told that most features of multi-window are turned off unless an application's manifest opts in. As far as I can tell, this means applications won't work so well unless the developer buys a Samsung tablet on which to test in addition to the other-brand phone and tablet that a developer already bought.

Re:All maximized all the time

[tibit]

So, your finger size scales with the pixel pitch of the screen? Uh, I didn't think so. Mobile device screens have a certain range of physical dimensions - they are to be mobile, after all. This range has stayed essentially fixed for the last decade. In that time, though, the pixel pitch has decreased by a factor of 4. Yet our fingers steadfastly refuse to follow this trend. We humans are so obsolete :) In my experience, cramming 2 or 4 apps on a 9 inch screen, just because there's 2 or 4 times as many pixels available, doesn't make any sense as long as you still have touch input as the main mode of interaction.

So, you claim, DUH, let's just add a keyboard/mouse input, and perhaps a fresnel lens to actually see those scaled-down apps. Nah, I'll just buy a 13 or 15 inch device instead, with an environment that was designed for that sort of input. Way less clunky than adding stuff to a mobile device.

Now answer the next question.

[Chas]

Who the fuck would WANT TO?

Seriously? After years of 20+" monitors at high resolution, who the hell is going to want to REALLY use Office on a little postage-stamp phone screen? With an on-screen keyboard no less?

Maybe I'm missing something. But do people HONESTLY think anyone is going to be anything remotely resembling productive building documents that way?

Re:Now answer the next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

who the hell is going to want to REALLY use Office on a little postage-stamp phone screen?

It's more intended for tablets than phones.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[LessThanObvious]

Your old school logic has no place in the Cloud.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[exomondo]

Seriously? After years of 20+" monitors at high resolution, who the hell is going to want to REALLY use Office on a little postage-stamp phone screen?

This is for use on phablets and tablets many of which have higher resolutions than the vast majority of desktop monitors, sad as that state of affairs is these days. I'm am wondering whether you have a really small phone or enormous postage stamps?

With an on-screen keyboard no less?

You can attach a keyboard if you really want to.

Maybe I'm missing something. But do people HONESTLY think anyone is going to be anything remotely resembling productive building documents that way?

No, but reviewing, commenting and simple editing most definitely.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

After years of 20+" monitors at high resolution,

Because:
A) My tablet has higher resolution than your desktop monitor.

B) I can take my tablet to the coffee shop, on the bus, to meetings, while your desktop remains chained to your desk.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[Chas]

"the cloud".

Silly buzzword for "renting space on someone's internet-connected VM".

Re:Now answer the next question.

[Chas]

Actually yeah.

Native resolution is one thing.

But the size of the screen is something else.

My 24" monitor is roughly 14x the size my Galaxy S4.

So yeah, I refer to that as a "postage stamp". A very NICE postage stamp. But still.

I get what you're saying about tablets and add-on keyboards. It's still somewhat at-odds with the fact that they're pushing this at iPhone/etc users as well.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[Chas]

After years of 20+" monitors at high resolution,

Because:
A) My tablet has higher resolution than your desktop monitor.

B) I can take my tablet to the coffee shop, on the bus, to meetings, while your desktop remains chained to your desk.

Not talking about tablets. Talking about why the fuck would anyone use this stuff on their phone.

With tablets, at least there's a use case there.

But on a phone?

Re:Now answer the next question.

[exomondo]

It's still somewhat at-odds with the fact that they're pushing this at iPhone/etc users as well.

I don't think it's designed to be the primary content creation tool, same way that Pages, Documents-to-Go, Google Docs, etc ... aren't. It's about being able to view and edit them.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[cbhacking]

It's a pretty easy way to do something like tweak a Powerpoint slide (maybe there was a typo, or you want to alter your notes for the slide?) on the bus to work, or to add a line in an Excel-based expense report while heading home from lunch. You aren't expected to write long documents on your phone, but being able to make edits is a nice feature.

As for tablets, lots of people have a keyboard (usually Bluetooth) for their tablet. Combined with the often very high resolution of modern tablets (I think iPads run at 2048x1536 or something these days?) and the fact that you're looking at it from much closer than you look at your 20+" monitor (not that 20" is big; I've had laptops nearly that big), there's no reason you couldn't be productive on such a device if you had the right software.

Re:Now answer the next question.

[cbhacking]

I have definitely tweaked Powerpoint slides and Excel spreadsheets on my phone. That was one of the key features of Windows phones.

Of course, they haven't sold too well so far, so maybe more people think like you than think like me. It was definitely useful, though.

Freemium?

[sootman]

Editing: now free!

In-app purchases:

• Bold: $0.99
• Italics: $0.99
• Left/Right/Center/Justify: $0.99
• "Power pack": numbered lists, bulleted lists, indent/outdent: $4.99

PS: Speaking of lists: Slashdot, why don't you fucking render bulleted lists?!?!?

Re:Freemium?

[Anonymous Coward]

for a limited time get clippy, the office mascot and all-around friendly helper, free with purchase. a $14.99 retail value.

Re:Freemium?

[WARM3CH]

Err, no! Clippy is included in all versions for free. You can pay $14.99 to get rid of it!

It is to laugh.

[westlake]

Subscription? To a.... word processor

The geek trying to be clever.

The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras; but you knew that already.

Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal alone is currently worth about $500 million a year in revenue to Microsoft. Consumer Office 365 tops a half-billion dollars in annual revenue run-rate

Re:It is to laugh.

[Camael]

Subscription? To a.... word processor

The geek trying to be clever.

The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras; but you knew that already.

Technically correct, but most people only want the word processing function of MS Office. Blame MS for bundling unwanted 'extras' together to jack up the price. If all that you want is a fridge, but you are forced to buy a package consisting of a fridge, warranty, parts replacement, delivery service, a fan and a cooler because that is the only way the manufacturer will sell it, in your mind you are still buying a fridge. The extras are irrelevant.

Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal alone is currently worth about $500 million a year in revenue to Microsoft.

Again irrelevant. The average MS Office user is blissfully unaware and uncaring about MS profits or lack thereof.

Re:It is to laugh.

[exomondo]

Technically correct, but most people only want the word processing function of MS Office.

Even back in 1996 Excel was the killer app, why would most people want Word significantly more than Excel?

Re:It is to laugh.

[lgw]

Excel has always been the killer app, since MS realized there was a huge base of customers with no interest in finance, but who needed a handy way to make lists. MS realized the power users weren't where the money was, and never looked back (not that Excel wasn't competitive at number crunching). It remains my favorite geeky-drawing program: the best graph paper ever.

Who even uses Word any more? Do people still print things?

But PowerPoint has been the primary app driving Office sales for quite some time. For those who live and die by the slideshow, nothing else comes close.

Re:It is to laugh.

[nukenerd]

Subscription? To a.... word processor

The geek trying to be clever. ... The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras

The point is that I, and I suspect most consumers, do not need or use anything but the word processor of an office suite.

The sales figures you quote only goes to show that people buy into stuff like Office 365 because they do not understand what they actually need or what it actually consists of; it just sounds like a good idea and they have seen it advertised on TV. Microsoft advertising and FUD over the years have created the idea in many people's minds that IT won't work without MS software - ie a PC won't work without Windows, and they can't write anything without the latest version of Office installed on it.

I even have a 20 year-old copy of WordPerfect that I recently installed in a Win98 VM under Linux in order to retrieve some documents I wrote back then (I was writing a family history). Even that would fulfil all my word processing needs, but in fact I use LibreOffice these days.

Re:It is to laugh.

[nukenerd]

Excel has always been the killer app, ..... It remains my favorite geeky-drawing program: the best graph paper ever.

Who even uses Word any more? Do people still print things?

You move in different circles from me. I have never known anyone personally who used Excel. At work I am among engineers of the nuts-and-bolts type who use their corporate Microsoft desktops for nothing but email and reading/writing reports in Word. The managers spend their days creating PowerPoints. I suppose the finance department might use Excel but I don't know any of them personally. And we print things; at every meeting or training course I go to I am handed wads of it - copies of all the PowerPoint slides for a start (it is assumed that we will study it later LoL!).

Re:It is to laugh.

[FerociousFerret]

Where I work, all of the Indian contractors have this ingrained need to dump everything into an Excel sheet and then send that out as an email attachment. You need to send a screen shot? Put it into an Excel file and send it. You need to write up some instructions (and include a few screen shots)? Put it in an Excel file and send it. The list goes on and on. I don't know if it is a culture thing or an outsourced training thing or what, but it is common practice and everyone does it. It is annoying as hell.

Re:It is to laugh.

[lgw]

At work I am among engineers of the nuts-and-bolts type

Well, the entire success of Microsoft was in "not making a product for engineers", so there you go. It's also why /. has always had a hate-on for MS: they thumbed their nose at the geeks from almost the start.

I can certainly see how an engineering group that has old-school government sign-off requirements could still be printing things, but I saw software engineering move from Word to wikis over the past 5 years - now Word docs on SharePoint is a warning sign of a backwards company.

Re:It is to laugh.

[ConceptJunkie]

In my experience, most people do the same thing, but using Word. It's really annoy when someone sends you a screenshot and it arrives in e-mail or a Bugzilla attachment as a .doc[x] file. :-/

Re:It is to laugh.

[terjeber]

You move in different circles from me. I have never known anyone personally who used Excel

You will, probably by the time you start high school, definitely by the time you start college. Once you join the work force you'll barely know a single person who do not use Excel.

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost as annoying as someone who can't stay on fucking topic...

Who stays on topic when the adverts are on?

We may as well chat amongst ourselves until Slashdot gets back to the "News for nerds, stuff that matters" program.

RTFA, its WORDPAD not Word

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be called Word, but no columns/sections breaks/tables/styles.... basically its the functionality of Wordpad on the editing side. It won't even flip to landscape mode.

So what they've done is repackage something equivalent to Wordpad, which was given away free with the OS, plus the Word Reader features set, which lets you read but not edit word document, and is also free, and called it Word.

I use Hancom Office which came with the tablet, and won't miss this.

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[Anonymous Coward]

You got it all wrong. It's actually about ethics in game journalism.

Re: At least something not involving feminism thes

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there life on Uranus?

because libreoffice

[behrooz0az]

Is coming to android pretty soon?
dev git download: http://dev-builds.libreoffice....

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[i.kazmi]

How in blazes does this not matter?

The 4 freedoms

[jbolden]

He most does support the 4 freedoms) He supports the existence of the kernel forks. So obviously the ability to modify and redistribute. His product is open source so the ability to change.There are no purpose restrictions nor have they ever been discussed.

He disagrees with RMS when it comes to the embedded space. He had strong disagreements with RMS on an architectural level about the directions of the GNU project which at this point even RMS has abandoned. In open source vs. free software and how best to relate to companies and commercial software entities i.e. political strategy they disagreed.

I think it is best to say the almost completely agreed on ends and had some strategic and tactical disputes on how to achieve those ends.

___

And no he does not think the Linux kernel should be the only kernel. He knows kernels too well. There are big advantages to some of the other kernels out there. What he wants is a free software ecosystem same as RMS.

A tablet is physically bigger than a phone

[tepples]

So, your finger size scales with the pixel pitch of the screen?

If I have a 5" phone with 1280x800 pixels and a 10" tablet with 2560x1600 pixels, the finger will cover the same number of pixels on each. Yet Android refuses to let me run four 5" phone apps on one 10" tablet.

Re:At least something not involving feminism these

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we sure Dick Cheney isn't a robot?

Not impressed, MIcrosoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day when Microsoft/Nokia was desperately trying to gain market share for Windows Phone, when Office was exclusive to Windows and not yet ported to Android and iOS. Then began the marketing blitz BS about how 'Windows phones are better suited for the enterprise'... basically insinuating that Office is a killer app.

It turns out that nobody cared about productivity on mobile devices. Mobile devices are primarily media consumption devices.

After a while, Microsoft thought "if you can't beat them, join them", and ported Office to iOS and Android, hoping to piggyback on their respective app stores and cash on on microtransactions and license fees.

And the rest, as they say, is history.