No one will use it because you will actually have to pay for this version of Office.
Just like no-one uses an iPad because you have to pay for one.
What are you talking about? Lots of people pay for Office.
Amazing how humorless BoingBoing commentators are these days.
I was surprised that it took so long for the iPad… I was quite shocked when they put out a full Microsoft Office Mobile suite for Symbian phones a couple years ago (didn’t seem to really offer any advantages over Quickoffice or Smart Office).
Yes, people pay for Office. But this version of Office requires you to pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and if you don’t keep paying? They turn it off and you can’t use it anymore.
Exactly. I suspect I’ll be using Office 2011 as long as MS keeps releasing security updates. After that, time to throw off the shackles of familiarity and the network effect and move on.
And of course like many people I’m not fond of writing on a tablet. Pages is adequate when I do.
I might have given Office for iPad a look if it were being sold as standalone software for a single price, but the subscription model means “no sale” here.
I was stunned when I started kitting out my recent iPad purchase, and found there was no Office suite. (No Open Office either!!) After some hunting for alternatives, I found that Apple was now offering iLife for free including Pages. Problem solved. The idea that I’d pay a monthly subscription fee to M$ is laughable.
Yeah, I’m surprised how hyped this is considering you can already open MS Office stuff on iPads already. But, I guess there’ll be some advantages as far as not dealing with as many conversion errors, etc. - Then again, I have Office for Mac and that has had conversion errors with Windows on occasion (not as much in recent years). I pretty much avoid MS products like Office as much as I can except when people send them to me, etc. anyway.
There’s really no other compelling reason for most people to update. Word processing software was more or less perfected back in the early '90s, most of the changes since then only serve to make it run slower.
anybody getting 500 internal server errors when trying to save a reply with a link?
(nevermind, i figured out it was an iTunes link, used a url shortener and could save the post below.)
There are quite a few of office suites on the iPad, most of them fully compatible with MS Office, some of them based on open office. There is even software that allows you to use desktop version of office over the network from their specially setup servers. Granted they are all somewhat hard to find, not sure if that was intentional on apple’s part. I found them all through google, not iTunes. Cheers.
I’ve been wanting to try hopTo, that looks like the best of the Office Alternatives.
http://goo.gl/mMlNDD
Am I reading correctly that MS Office on the iPad is $99.00 per year to create documents?..wow.
subscription model means “no sale” here.
Yeah, that’s going to be the deal killer for a lot of people.
Adobe kept saying that their creative cloud subscription was going to do wonders for their business, but revenue is down just like many of us predicted. Of course, some of the corporate media is trying to polish that turd the best they can for them by playing tricks with numbers.
I had that problem the other day with a vimeo link here. I had to save the post without the vimeo link then edit the post and add the vimeo link afterwards.
I think the risk is not so much that people won’t pay - at least, corporations will, they’re used to this - it’s that Microsoft will start gaming advances in the software, slowing down change in the overall market. A bit of built-in obsolescence.
I [have to] use MS Excel extensively, and it’s incredibly good for what I do. Being a power-ish user (ok, I’m a geek), I know that they’ve slowly changed it over the years for mostly the better.
Mind you - if I could buy just Excel, I’d be perfectly happy to forgo the suite.
On the other hand I own a new Office 2013 license, which the app should detect through my Microsoft account. Plus previous Office versions. Apparently, this counts for nothing.
Each version of Office has been good for at least five years. I expect Office 2013 to be no different. In that time they want another $500 just to add iPad editing. I’ll pass.
I downloaded several word processing options, a couple of which were looking good, and then the iLife free release popped up with Pages available and the problem was solved. Mostly I wanted something so I could work while on planes (the main reason I wanted the iPad anyway - my 15" MacBook Pro is difficult to use on a tray table and impossible with some of the seat-back TVs that stick out), so anything requiring a network connection was a no-go, but I got plenty done with Pages.
Subscription-based software models can suck it.
100% agree, and 0% surprised that MS went with it. Even though MS owes its size, wealth and power to Mac users of Office (since they avoided getting sued by Apple over the similarities of Windows to the original Mac OS by threatening to stop supporting Office for the Mac), Office for Mac has been the red-headed stepchild of MS ever since. The best version of Word for the Mac, 5.1, came out in 1992.
Microsoft used to print money back when Ballmer took over. Look where they are now: writing off $1B worth of tablets, Windows 8 debacle, Playstation kicking butt over the new xbox, Chrome beating IE10 market adoption, and on and on.
Up in their own little world in Seattle, they must think Office on an iPad is some kind of game changer, and by holding the release back, they’re somehow throttling iPad adoption or something like that.
Are they really pricing Office at $100? How can they be so out of touch?
And you know what? No one is going to feel sorry for these arrogant pricks as their company slides further and further into oblivion.
