I also like my simple touch. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Microsoft will nuke the ebooks I've bought through B&N just like they did to all the songs marked as "plays for sure".
I buy books from B&N (and occasionally Google, when their prices are better) because I believe in supporting authors and the publishers that put out their books.
I also immediately crack the books I buy and store copies of them locally and on cloud storage, so I'll never lose them just because the Nook store shuts down. Removing the DRM takes less than a second.
That's right. That's business. Sometimes that's the best business decision.
I think what the GP was implying is that Microsoft had no chance of growing a market in e-books, couldn't grow one if it tried, and that once it owns Nook it will still be completely incapable of growing the market it just bought -- in fact it will shrink. Sometimes the best business decision is to stay out of markets where your company has no competency.
So Nook was a failure for B&N? Sure, maybe it's not giving Amazon as much of a run for its money as B&N hoped. But then again, just what does B&N think it's going to do if it gives up on Nook now? Sell magazines and coffee? Good luck on that >cough< Borders >cough<.
Silver lining: If they bring back the Start button but still require Metro apps to be deployed from the Windows Store only we'll know the idiots have won.
Does anybody really care about the Start button? All of my keyboards have a great big Windows key on them, and all of the Windows 8 tablets I've seen have a Windows button at the bottom of the display. What I think people really want is the Start menu -- and I am absolutely not convinced that Microsoft is going to give us that back, button or no button.
As for the Desktop mode, I agree that it is not well-suited for a tablet (unless is comes with a physical keyboard, but then it's a netbook not a tablet). The keyboard is not the same and won't activate automatically; using the touch interface for right-clicks is awkward and having to mess around with thin scrollbars is unpleasant. In my opinion it's a poor way to slowly migrate people towards Metro.
But the worse of it all is that Office is not available in Metro, only on Desktop.
So basically you first call me a coward for stating my opinion on Slashdot (as if stating it somewhere else would make me more "brave") and then you agree with everything I said about the bad keyboard and poor tablet experience when trying to use Office on Windows. Have it your way then, guy.
At the end of the day Windows 8 is not a bad OS and does not deserve all the misinformed bashing it gets. It is pretty stable, has a decent firewall and antivirus built-in, has very effective file versioning features and does a good job of storing settings (and files if desired) in the cloud.
None of which has anything to do with the fact that it offers a pretty lousy experience on a tablet, which was the topic of discussion.
BTW, I use Windows 8 every day on laptops, desktops, and now tablets, so I believe I'm entitled to my opinion on it -- more so than many, in fact. What you call "bashing," I call informed criticism.
When you say "Windows tablet" do you mean Surface?
No. A Samsung device.
In any event, predictive text IS available in the vanilla Windows 8, you just have to enable it in the "Ease of access options" app
So you're telling me that in order to get a feature that's standard on many platforms, I need to find the control panel that historically has been used to switch on features for the disabled? Why isn't there an option in the keyboard itself, instead of forcing me to go hunting all over creation to find it?
In Windows 8 there is a small eye icon in password fields when they get the focus, if you click on it you can see the field content in clear text.
That's only of minimal help when I'm trying to enter a mix of letters, numbers, and symbol characters and the keyboard is finicky.
Seriously, WIndows 8 has plenty of issues but people who can't STFW for basic tutorial information are just adding noise to the discussion.
And as others have noted, searching the web to find techniques that should be intuitive is not a good solution. I think you're going out of your way to apologize for poor usability design. The tablet experience on Windows 8 is just not particularly great, and it only gets worse when you want to use desktop apps (such as Office, which is what Gates was bragging about).
One thing I've noticed since switching to a Windows tablet is how lousy the onscreen keyboard is. On most platforms, touchscreen keyboards try to incorporate things like predictive text, auto-capitalization, etc to help you type, because they realize that a touchscreen with no tactile feedback is a less-than-idea way to type. The Windows onscreen keyboards have none of that. What's more, they seem wildly inaccurate... the visual feedback seems to be telling me that I'm hitting the right keys, but when I look up at what I entered, half of the letters are keys right next to the ones I thought I was hitting (and although I can touch type on a physical keyboard, I do have to look at the keys on a tablet).
What exactly do you do on a computer? Im gonna guess its not
Writing proposals Writing code Doing financial work Doing systems administration
Screw all of that. Before you can do any of that, you have to enter your password to login to the system first. Try that when you have a strong password and you can't be totally sure what keys you're pressing.
There are a lot of culture changes "no one wants." Among these are racially integrated societies. I'm not comparing the two, but I am saying that "unpopular ideas" should not be restricted based on their lack of popularity.
Wait... are you actually arguing that walled White Power townships should be allowed to exist? In America?
Don't forget Google and Apple, both of which operate online bookstores, too. If we're going to talk about "the ebook market," I don't think tracking sales of ereaders is the way to do it.
The problem is that they don't sell washing machines.
Amazon make enough profit in other areas of their business (eg: advertising) that they don't need to make a profit selling eBooks.
This is actually the case with Kobo, too. As others have pointed out, Kobo is owned by Japanese internet giant Rakuten, which makes a lotta money. In their earnings statements, they don't even break out the Kobo division's revenue as a separate line item. So they said Kobo revenues were "up 143%" last year, but they didn't say how much they actually were. Thus I take their claim that they're #2 in the ebook biz with a grain of salt.
Yeah, maybe I just don't understand gamers, but I don't get all the fuss either. This is a collection of fun/weird things that you can plant in your city, like a big garden gnome or the "world's biggest ball of twine." They're free; all you gotta do is buy a tube of toothpaste or some floss, which I hope you're doing anyway. This just seems like harmless fun stuff for people who like to put their own stamp on their game worlds. And if it wasn't Crest sponsoring them, it would have been someone else.
“Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began.
This one quote points to the main problem I had with A New Kind of Science, which was that Wolfram seemed to start with a plausible, interesting premise -- "patterns we see in nature can be modeled using very simple cellular automata" -- but then he seemed to repeatedly conclude that "these cellular automata are therefore what are running the processes of nature," which seems absurd.
It's like he has this bizarre short circuit in his brain where he thinks a successful model is necessarily identical to the real process, so that if you stare deeper and deeper into the model -- which you yourself created -- then you will be able to understand more about the real-world process without ever doing so much as a real-world experiment. What do you call that, if not a god complex?
Otherwise, I found Wolfram's text to be more or less indistinguishable from any other long-winded crank science manifesto that purports to refute all of known science and usher in a new age of progress if only the bastards weren't trying to keep me quiet, god damn them! It seems a shame that he's dedicated so much of his life to such pursuits when he seems to be an otherwise competent mathematician and programmer. Kind of a wasted life, if you ask me.
Eh? Netflix seems to work just fine on my Android tablets, and I'm pretty sure it's not using Silverlight there. Probably doesn't use it on the various Smart TVs and Blu-Ray players that support it, either. Is this just a case of Google deciding to enable something that other people were using already? Or do these other platforms use Moonlight or something?
Wow, where can you do that? What distribution channels does that give you access to?
For a lot of types of music, there is no mass market. The "distribution channels" are MySpace, Facebook, and Amazon. The role of the record label is minimal.
I had one friend who managed to score a distribution deal with a pretty big indy distributor. It meant you could walk into any Virgin Megastore on Earth and buy his CD. But did you? No... you didn't. Those CDs sat there for a few months and were rotated out for something else. Distribution channels aren't everything... and this isn't the music industry of even a few years ago.
That said, realize that all a record label really is is a bank with a lot of connections. Everything a major record label "spends" on you... for recording, mixing, mastering, distribution, promotion... is really just a loan. Nothing is a gift. You get paid, but not before they've made back every penny they spent on you. Putting out an album with record label backing is 100% analogous to starting a company with VC funding.
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
That said, $125 for an ISBN is only "very expensive" in a country where the average person spends less than $125 for a bag of groceries. Which ain't this one.
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money! I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences? Honestly, I've made my living as a writer for well over a decade now, so I know what it's like to make no money at all... but $2,500 is such an inconsequential amount of funds to spend on your own dreams that I just can't comprehend anybody complaining about it. In this society, $2,500 is the kind of money you don't even need to ask somebody for... just fill out a form, they'll send you a card, and you can get a $2,500 loan -- or more -- without ever looking a human in the eye. So... we're bitching about $250 now? No wait... we're apparently bitching about $125?
Instead of training your staff not to open phishy emails, just ban any email client that allows execute-on-open.
I'm not sure that's the main problem, actually. Where spear phishing is concerned, I mostly hear about emails that are crafted to look like legitimate messages from companies like banks, FedEx, etc. If you can convince someone to click through to a website, it's not hard to ship them malware -- particularly if they have the Java plugin enabled.
One of the most annoying things about the MS API documentation is all the unexplained dependencies.
I've noticed this even when trying to do simple things -- such as whipping up a quick VBA macro for use in Word.
My question, though, is how do you think Microsoft should do it? Those structs exist, they need to be documented... isn't hyperlinking to a page of documentation the most efficient way to achieve that?
Speak for yourself. I routinely carry a Nook Simple Touch in my back pocket, which is about the size of a 7" tablet. It's a lot more convenient than carrying a trade paperback book. With a book, I'll probably need to leave the house with a shoulder bag. With the Nook, I just put it in my pocket, irrespective of how long the book I'm reading is. When I want to sit down, I just take it out of my pocket and put it on the table. It works pretty well -- provided, of course, that you live in a city where you don't spend the majority of your time driving.
It's true, though. The Nexus 7 fits into the back pocket of a pair of Levi's 501s, though it's a little too long to be comfortable. It will also fit into the inside pocket of a lot of jackets, but it's a bit heavy to carry there.
If you have people using different versions of Office, you can always open the document from your peers, but you get myriad small issues. The document never looks exactly the same.
I wouldn't say that's always the case. And is it a problem with the file format or with the software? If web pages don't look right in Internet Explorer, is that HTML's fault? How about if an HTML5 web page doesn't look right in Firefox 2.0? I wouldn't say a program "breaks" compatibility with a file format change unless the new files can't be opened by the older software. If the old software can open the file, but it looks just a little off, I wouldn't call that breakage.
It could be a good move if MS used a stable standard file format, but since they always slightly breake backward compatibility, the more upgrade we get, the more mess we have.
Oh really? So far as I know, nothing has broken backward compatibility for the Office document formats since Office 2007.
Sure, they have introduced new features into newer versions of Office. Older versions of Office that didn't include those features won't recognize them. But that doesn't prevent the documents from opening in the earlier version -- you just get an error message. But if you create a document in Office 2013 that only uses features that were present in Office 2007, it will open just fine in Office 2007 (again, so far as I know; maybe you know otherwise).
In my mind, that means the Office document formats have been pretty much "stable" for at least five years -- which might not sound like a long time, but in the computer industry it actually sort of is. There are certainly worse offenders.
Does Excel really need another mathematical function that only a person with a PhD in some obscure branch of mathematics has heard of?
Seems like what they mostly add to Excel are new visualizations, i.e. new ways to display data, rather than to calculate it. They're also adding things like new PowerPoint visual effects, tools to make it easier to edit graphics from right within PowerPoint and Word, etc. None of it is essential, but it's easy to see how someone who uses the product a lot could think they're pretty cool additions. I suspect these are the kinds of things Microsoft will be pushing with their Office updates, more so than anything really significant.
The cynic in me says that they will keep changing the file format in order to keep forcing people to upgrade and the subscription service is just to smooth out revenues instead of having very large sales every couple of years.
I have no reason to suspect the file formats will change in any way that breaks backward compatibility. But I'd say you're right on the money with the rest of your sentiment, no cynicism required. Note that the infrastructure for these supposed 90-day updates (Microsoft hasn't said it will actually do them every 90 days) is only included in the Office 365 version of the suite. It has a different installation method and its own software update feature. Microsoft has already said that it will be releasing Office 365-only software updates using this mechanism. What it's doing now is trying to plant the idea in customers' minds that if they don't get onto the subscription model they will be "missing out" -- or worse, that they won't get bug fixes and security updates as fast as subscription customers. The latter is probably not actually true, but you won't catch Microsoft's sales staff denying it.
Slashdot Mirror
We now know that the human glia cells -- well, some of them, anyhow -- when injected into mouse brains, make them human-smart mice.
Really? How did we test this hypothesis -- watch and see if any of the mice tried to take over the world?
I also like my simple touch. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Microsoft will nuke the ebooks I've bought through B&N just like they did to all the songs marked as "plays for sure".
I buy books from B&N (and occasionally Google, when their prices are better) because I believe in supporting authors and the publishers that put out their books.
I also immediately crack the books I buy and store copies of them locally and on cloud storage, so I'll never lose them just because the Nook store shuts down. Removing the DRM takes less than a second.
That's right. That's business. Sometimes that's the best business decision.
I think what the GP was implying is that Microsoft had no chance of growing a market in e-books, couldn't grow one if it tried, and that once it owns Nook it will still be completely incapable of growing the market it just bought -- in fact it will shrink. Sometimes the best business decision is to stay out of markets where your company has no competency.
So Nook was a failure for B&N? Sure, maybe it's not giving Amazon as much of a run for its money as B&N hoped. But then again, just what does B&N think it's going to do if it gives up on Nook now? Sell magazines and coffee? Good luck on that >cough< Borders >cough<.
Silver lining: If they bring back the Start button but still require Metro apps to be deployed from the Windows Store only we'll know the idiots have won.
Does anybody really care about the Start button? All of my keyboards have a great big Windows key on them, and all of the Windows 8 tablets I've seen have a Windows button at the bottom of the display. What I think people really want is the Start menu -- and I am absolutely not convinced that Microsoft is going to give us that back, button or no button.
As for the Desktop mode, I agree that it is not well-suited for a tablet (unless is comes with a physical keyboard, but then it's a netbook not a tablet). The keyboard is not the same and won't activate automatically; using the touch interface for right-clicks is awkward and having to mess around with thin scrollbars is unpleasant. In my opinion it's a poor way to slowly migrate people towards Metro.
But the worse of it all is that Office is not available in Metro, only on Desktop.
So basically you first call me a coward for stating my opinion on Slashdot (as if stating it somewhere else would make me more "brave") and then you agree with everything I said about the bad keyboard and poor tablet experience when trying to use Office on Windows. Have it your way then, guy.
At the end of the day Windows 8 is not a bad OS and does not deserve all the misinformed bashing it gets. It is pretty stable, has a decent firewall and antivirus built-in, has very effective file versioning features and does a good job of storing settings (and files if desired) in the cloud.
None of which has anything to do with the fact that it offers a pretty lousy experience on a tablet, which was the topic of discussion.
BTW, I use Windows 8 every day on laptops, desktops, and now tablets, so I believe I'm entitled to my opinion on it -- more so than many, in fact. What you call "bashing," I call informed criticism.
When you say "Windows tablet" do you mean Surface?
No. A Samsung device.
In any event, predictive text IS available in the vanilla Windows 8, you just have to enable it in the "Ease of access options" app
So you're telling me that in order to get a feature that's standard on many platforms, I need to find the control panel that historically has been used to switch on features for the disabled? Why isn't there an option in the keyboard itself, instead of forcing me to go hunting all over creation to find it?
In Windows 8 there is a small eye icon in password fields when they get the focus, if you click on it you can see the field content in clear text.
That's only of minimal help when I'm trying to enter a mix of letters, numbers, and symbol characters and the keyboard is finicky.
Seriously, WIndows 8 has plenty of issues but people who can't STFW for basic tutorial information are just adding noise to the discussion.
And as others have noted, searching the web to find techniques that should be intuitive is not a good solution. I think you're going out of your way to apologize for poor usability design. The tablet experience on Windows 8 is just not particularly great, and it only gets worse when you want to use desktop apps (such as Office, which is what Gates was bragging about).
One thing I've noticed since switching to a Windows tablet is how lousy the onscreen keyboard is. On most platforms, touchscreen keyboards try to incorporate things like predictive text, auto-capitalization, etc to help you type, because they realize that a touchscreen with no tactile feedback is a less-than-idea way to type. The Windows onscreen keyboards have none of that. What's more, they seem wildly inaccurate ... the visual feedback seems to be telling me that I'm hitting the right keys, but when I look up at what I entered, half of the letters are keys right next to the ones I thought I was hitting (and although I can touch type on a physical keyboard, I do have to look at the keys on a tablet).
What exactly do you do on a computer? Im gonna guess its not
Writing proposals
Writing code
Doing financial work
Doing systems administration
Screw all of that. Before you can do any of that, you have to enter your password to login to the system first. Try that when you have a strong password and you can't be totally sure what keys you're pressing.
There are a lot of culture changes "no one wants." Among these are racially integrated societies. I'm not comparing the two, but I am saying that "unpopular ideas" should not be restricted based on their lack of popularity.
Wait ... are you actually arguing that walled White Power townships should be allowed to exist? In America?
Don't forget Google and Apple, both of which operate online bookstores, too. If we're going to talk about "the ebook market," I don't think tracking sales of ereaders is the way to do it.
The problem is that they don't sell washing machines.
Amazon make enough profit in other areas of their business (eg: advertising) that they don't need to make a profit selling eBooks.
This is actually the case with Kobo, too. As others have pointed out, Kobo is owned by Japanese internet giant Rakuten, which makes a lotta money. In their earnings statements, they don't even break out the Kobo division's revenue as a separate line item. So they said Kobo revenues were "up 143%" last year, but they didn't say how much they actually were. Thus I take their claim that they're #2 in the ebook biz with a grain of salt.
He disrespected me and my craft
What ... did he send you a letter or something? Let us see it.
If you're claiming that Roger Ebert disrespected the craft of movie-making, on the other hand, you're a fool.
Yeah, maybe I just don't understand gamers, but I don't get all the fuss either. This is a collection of fun/weird things that you can plant in your city, like a big garden gnome or the "world's biggest ball of twine." They're free; all you gotta do is buy a tube of toothpaste or some floss, which I hope you're doing anyway. This just seems like harmless fun stuff for people who like to put their own stamp on their game worlds. And if it wasn't Crest sponsoring them, it would have been someone else.
He was big enough to get his own TV show, and it was very popular! This is astounding when you consider other types of art criticism.
He was also the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize ... for movie reviews. That achievement, in and of itself, deserves respect.
“Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began.
This one quote points to the main problem I had with A New Kind of Science, which was that Wolfram seemed to start with a plausible, interesting premise -- "patterns we see in nature can be modeled using very simple cellular automata" -- but then he seemed to repeatedly conclude that "these cellular automata are therefore what are running the processes of nature," which seems absurd.
It's like he has this bizarre short circuit in his brain where he thinks a successful model is necessarily identical to the real process, so that if you stare deeper and deeper into the model -- which you yourself created -- then you will be able to understand more about the real-world process without ever doing so much as a real-world experiment. What do you call that, if not a god complex?
Otherwise, I found Wolfram's text to be more or less indistinguishable from any other long-winded crank science manifesto that purports to refute all of known science and usher in a new age of progress if only the bastards weren't trying to keep me quiet, god damn them! It seems a shame that he's dedicated so much of his life to such pursuits when he seems to be an otherwise competent mathematician and programmer. Kind of a wasted life, if you ask me.
Eh? Netflix seems to work just fine on my Android tablets, and I'm pretty sure it's not using Silverlight there. Probably doesn't use it on the various Smart TVs and Blu-Ray players that support it, either. Is this just a case of Google deciding to enable something that other people were using already? Or do these other platforms use Moonlight or something?
Wow, where can you do that? What distribution channels does that give you access to?
For a lot of types of music, there is no mass market. The "distribution channels" are MySpace, Facebook, and Amazon. The role of the record label is minimal.
I had one friend who managed to score a distribution deal with a pretty big indy distributor. It meant you could walk into any Virgin Megastore on Earth and buy his CD. But did you? No ... you didn't. Those CDs sat there for a few months and were rotated out for something else. Distribution channels aren't everything ... and this isn't the music industry of even a few years ago.
That said, realize that all a record label really is is a bank with a lot of connections. Everything a major record label "spends" on you ... for recording, mixing, mastering, distribution, promotion ... is really just a loan. Nothing is a gift. You get paid, but not before they've made back every penny they spent on you. Putting out an album with record label backing is 100% analogous to starting a company with VC funding.
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
That said, $125 for an ISBN is only "very expensive" in a country where the average person spends less than $125 for a bag of groceries. Which ain't this one.
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money! I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences? Honestly, I've made my living as a writer for well over a decade now, so I know what it's like to make no money at all ... but $2,500 is such an inconsequential amount of funds to spend on your own dreams that I just can't comprehend anybody complaining about it. In this society, $2,500 is the kind of money you don't even need to ask somebody for ... just fill out a form, they'll send you a card, and you can get a $2,500 loan -- or more -- without ever looking a human in the eye. So ... we're bitching about $250 now? No wait... we're apparently bitching about $125?
Instead of training your staff not to open phishy emails, just ban any email client that allows execute-on-open.
I'm not sure that's the main problem, actually. Where spear phishing is concerned, I mostly hear about emails that are crafted to look like legitimate messages from companies like banks, FedEx, etc. If you can convince someone to click through to a website, it's not hard to ship them malware -- particularly if they have the Java plugin enabled.
One of the most annoying things about the MS API documentation is all the unexplained dependencies.
I've noticed this even when trying to do simple things -- such as whipping up a quick VBA macro for use in Word.
My question, though, is how do you think Microsoft should do it? Those structs exist, they need to be documented ... isn't hyperlinking to a page of documentation the most efficient way to achieve that?
Speak for yourself. I routinely carry a Nook Simple Touch in my back pocket, which is about the size of a 7" tablet. It's a lot more convenient than carrying a trade paperback book. With a book, I'll probably need to leave the house with a shoulder bag. With the Nook, I just put it in my pocket, irrespective of how long the book I'm reading is. When I want to sit down, I just take it out of my pocket and put it on the table. It works pretty well -- provided, of course, that you live in a city where you don't spend the majority of your time driving.
It's true, though. The Nexus 7 fits into the back pocket of a pair of Levi's 501s, though it's a little too long to be comfortable. It will also fit into the inside pocket of a lot of jackets, but it's a bit heavy to carry there.
If you have people using different versions of Office, you can always open the document from your peers, but you get myriad small issues. The document never looks exactly the same.
I wouldn't say that's always the case. And is it a problem with the file format or with the software? If web pages don't look right in Internet Explorer, is that HTML's fault? How about if an HTML5 web page doesn't look right in Firefox 2.0? I wouldn't say a program "breaks" compatibility with a file format change unless the new files can't be opened by the older software. If the old software can open the file, but it looks just a little off, I wouldn't call that breakage.
It could be a good move if MS used a stable standard file format, but since they always slightly breake backward compatibility, the more upgrade we get, the more mess we have.
Oh really? So far as I know, nothing has broken backward compatibility for the Office document formats since Office 2007.
Sure, they have introduced new features into newer versions of Office. Older versions of Office that didn't include those features won't recognize them. But that doesn't prevent the documents from opening in the earlier version -- you just get an error message. But if you create a document in Office 2013 that only uses features that were present in Office 2007, it will open just fine in Office 2007 (again, so far as I know; maybe you know otherwise).
In my mind, that means the Office document formats have been pretty much "stable" for at least five years -- which might not sound like a long time, but in the computer industry it actually sort of is. There are certainly worse offenders.
Does Excel really need another mathematical function that only a person with a PhD in some obscure branch of mathematics has heard of?
Seems like what they mostly add to Excel are new visualizations, i.e. new ways to display data, rather than to calculate it. They're also adding things like new PowerPoint visual effects, tools to make it easier to edit graphics from right within PowerPoint and Word, etc. None of it is essential, but it's easy to see how someone who uses the product a lot could think they're pretty cool additions. I suspect these are the kinds of things Microsoft will be pushing with their Office updates, more so than anything really significant.
The cynic in me says that they will keep changing the file format in order to keep forcing people to upgrade and the subscription service is just to smooth out revenues instead of having very large sales every couple of years.
I have no reason to suspect the file formats will change in any way that breaks backward compatibility. But I'd say you're right on the money with the rest of your sentiment, no cynicism required. Note that the infrastructure for these supposed 90-day updates (Microsoft hasn't said it will actually do them every 90 days) is only included in the Office 365 version of the suite. It has a different installation method and its own software update feature. Microsoft has already said that it will be releasing Office 365-only software updates using this mechanism. What it's doing now is trying to plant the idea in customers' minds that if they don't get onto the subscription model they will be "missing out" -- or worse, that they won't get bug fixes and security updates as fast as subscription customers. The latter is probably not actually true, but you won't catch Microsoft's sales staff denying it.