I’m surprised MS haven’t learnt some tricks from the Phone and Tablet game market.
Oh you want to change that sentence to a heading? In 24 hours we’ll do that for free, or just spend 10 credits now. Buy credits in the Office Credit Shop Now!
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Oh good I was waiting for the chance to overcharged for office software I can get free equivalents of.
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Office for Mac has been a much more polished piece of software that hasn’t suffered from any of the BS the main line has been through. When I use Office on the Mac and Office on the PC I’ve always been amazed at how much better the Mac versions are. Have you had a different experience?
that is per year!!! $100.00 per year. yeah no thanks. ironically I’d probably pay $19.95 for the full suite if it was a one time purchase. and that is like a bajillion dollars in iPad pricing.
I agree 100%. Anything subscription based sucks. That is why I’m at CS6 with Adobe and plan on staying there until viable alternatives come out. They lost this customer when they decided to be subscription based. I hate subscription based more then i hate in app purchases, which says a lot. One time flat pricing is the way i prefer, with discounted upgrades for people who purchased previous versions.
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I can’t see that it will gain much uptake. When will Apple produce iWorks for Windows?
Are they planing on supporting Legacy OSs? 
Well, the subscription based model does suck - but [disclaimer: I have to use Excel, no choice, so I’m trying hard to look at positives - I’m no MS fan, everything I do is in the MacWorld bar VMWare Fusion so I can work in MS environment] if you consider MS has been forcing change every three years or so with new versions, and those iterations cost here in the UK about … £400 ($550) for small businesses like me, then it means no real change to outgoings.
That is an issue - no real change to pricing. It’s impossible to understand the linkage between the effort and time put into improving these programs and the value of the changeover - and with MS, you can’t help but feel like they’re rolling you over.
For instance - To get onto Office 2010+ now, I have to upgrade Windows and Office (I’m on XP), which is a total nightmare. I seriously don’t want to do this. Maybe there is a solution - but if I create an Excel model for a client, on the new 365 subscription service, there’s a damn good chance they’re rolling with Excel 2007 / 2010, and any “advanced” work I do will be incompatible.
The marketeers at MS will view that as incentivising the migration to the newer version - but not really. It just sucks. CTOs / CIOs absolutely hate upgrading.
This will be a pain for a few years.
Does the iPad version of Excel even support those “advanced” features such as VBA? I’m pretty sure that it is against the apple developer TOS to include such an engine. There is a reason that even Chrome on iPad uses Apples javascript engine instead of google’s.
I’ve yet to see an advanced features breakdown of the iPad version, but I am very curious and would love to. That would be an interesting tech article for whomever wants to do the evaluation and write up.
There are plenty of good excel compatible spreadsheet programs if you steer clear of the MS ONLY portions of excel. If you need those then you are indeed out of luck and will find them not to be the same from one version of excel to another unfortunately.
Even if the pricing appears to come out the same for some people, the subscription model still sucks. You could continue to use one of those old copies of office into the ground, or transfer old licenses to those that could use them, or any number of things. The only times I like subscription licensing is when it is for huge libraries of material that I wouldn’t buy, such as shows/movies or music or images, etc, as that is really the only time that sort of license isn’t specifically crafted to screw people over, imho.
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Yep, MS definitely chowed down in the 90s on selling sucky software to people, and, much like the music business, will never forget those heady days.
Excel does show significant [power-user] progress over versions; solving things behind the scenes that ultimately make it worthwhile upgrading.
The VB aspect is interesting. For what I do, I use a lot of VB, but I can envisage applications of the New World where I can eliminate that requirement for iPad - which I’d only ever use to display and interrogate in light touch ways.
What I need is an open source something that can absorb an excel model with backing VBA and duplicate the performance. I cannot stand MS’s gouging, and their prior silly focus on making Excel “mass market” by prettifying it on the surface. But, as a business, I have to say give me a fair price for something, and I’ll pay. $130 per year for the lynchpin of my world, sadly, is fair enough. They know what they’re doing!
Mind you, if MS really caught on, they’d charge me $2,000 a year.
Yup, Word 5.1 for Mac (1992) to be precise. It’s been mostly downhill from there.
I managed to hold out for a full decade between upgrades, from Office 10.x (2001) to 14.x (2011). Only thing really wrong with 10.x was compatibility with the more modern file formats (even with converters available, it was spotty) and a handful of features. In most important respects, at least as far as my usage patterns are concerned, it’s almost identical. I guess the change-tracking interface is improved, but on the other hand Find & Replace is full of giant leaps backward.
That just gave me a little attack of the creeping horrors, thanks.
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Thing is, wordpro software, at its most elemental, is not terribly hard to create. If they did that - and they’d only have one chance - the market would shatter and splinter into a thousand different compatible variants. So they never will.
(I know you were addressing someone else, but…) Yes, way back with OS 9. But it was enough to sour me on Office for Mac. Little pain-in-the ass things like, oh, the SUM in Excel giving the wrong sum.
(EDIT: Come to think of it, the SUM was wrong after I opened an XLS file from Windows on the Mac (not when starting a spreadsheet from scratch). But that was still pretty fuckin’ useless.)
But “red headed stepchild” and “Mac” makes me think of the old Remedy User Tool for Mac.
Word, Excel and Powerpoint are 1,2,3 on the productivity downloads chart (free).
I guess I sort of expected that. Anyway, there you go.
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