The assumption underlying this whole article is that you don't "need" Office to do work. That somehow iStuff will fill in your missing productivity suite. This just isn't backed by reality.
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
Is there honestly any real competition in that field from tablets and iStuff and the like? No. Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but work is done on a desktop, where you need to do a lot of typing and clicking. The interface is simply better for that.
Moreover, Microsoft Office has pretty much nailed its niche: I challenge you to find a better office suite. Here's what you'll have to do:
1. Find me an office suite that works out-of-the-box.
2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email, database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet, simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
3. Find me an office suite that does (2) fairly well.
4. Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
There's some nifty stuff on the net as thin clients running in HTML5. There's some cool stuff happening in tablets. But the author is sorely mistaken in presuming that the world has somehow moved past Office.
EDIT: And yes, I've tried Google Docs and OpenOffice and WordPerfect and all these things--but for raw "get the bidness done" Office is pretty much it.
EDIT2: And Word's spellchecker could've saved me. >:(
> The assumption underlying this whole article is that you
> don't "need" Office to do work. That somehow iStuff will
> fill in your missing productivity suite. This just isn't
> backed by reality.
It's absolutely backed by reality. Just because some offices will or can not doesn't mean it's impossible.
> 2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email,
> database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet,
> simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
No.
Microsoft has convinced folks that they need one suite that does all of these things. This is patently not true. For example: I can use GMail, Keynote, Basecamp, and RTF documents to do everything I need to do, with heavier publishing-style stuff in Pages. If I need to interact with folks using Office, iWork has never failed to fill in that role.
Just because you're stuck in Office-land doesn't mean you have to be.
You're suggesting that Microsoft has brainwashed the global business community into thinking they need a single suite to perform those tasks? I'd say it's more plausible that they arrived at that conclusion on their own since it just works better
I think it's more like it's the low-friction way to go. Most enterprises do not have as their core mission the production of documents. Dealing with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. is a requirement but it's not their core business mission. Spending time identifying, installing, and managing a hodgepodge of other software to do what Office does has no return on investment. Specifying the standard complement of software for an employee PC becomes a 2-second exercise: Office. Done. Now I can think about something that might add value to what we do as a business.
I don't think that it would be a terrific stretch to say that any business outside of programming/webdev/design/etc with greater than 90% certainty uses Office.
Hell, a few years ago on one of my professional engineering exams I had a section devoted to macros in Excel. Just because we know of and use other tools doesn't make our experience the norm.
(and for what it's worth, I do my note-taking on gmail, my typesetting in latex, my math in octave, and my presentations in libreoffice...and still use Office at work because--hey, guess what--that's what I know is the common denominator for everyone)
I'm not disagreeing with you on the "lots of businesses use Office" point. It's true, and there's no getting around it.
The point of the article (also of my comment) wasn't "Nobody ever needs Office again" or "nobody uses Office anymore." That's silly, of course it's used. And it's not a bad product.
So a lot of businesses use Office. Great, we've established that point. But more to TFA's point: a lot of folks can get by fine without Office. You and I already knew we could avoid it. But now, folks who used to rely on Office are buying iPads and Macs (for instance) and getting productive things done without Office, whereas before they might not have realized they could do that.
>I can use GMail, Keynote, Basecamp, and RTF documents to do everything I need to do, with heavier publishing-style stuff in Pages. If I need to interact with folks using Office, iWork has never failed to fill in that role.
Do you use all of these only on the iPad or the iPhone, including Pages?
> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
Microsoft Office basically doesn't satisfy this requirement itself.
I get frustrated with LibreOffice not importing files correctly, but then when I went to an Office 2007 to attempt to import an Office 2003 file, I found it was also failing to import correctly there.
The .doc format is such garbage that they can't even manage to import it correctly in their own software reliably.
Well, I've had a different experience. More than once. So I'd say it's not that extremely unlikely.
Maybe my lawyer has a really old version of Word or something and he keeps sending me files in an old format that isn't supported as well.
I've also had a lot of files opened flawlessly by LibreOffice; it depends on how many features you're using. Maybe you're trading documents that aren't that complicated?
Word has its flaws, yes, just like anything else. Still, I've tried every other thing available, and nothing comes close.
You see, it is the word processor for all the non-techie people out there. They have no idea how to properly use it (and pc's in general), so they blame Word for all their faults.
LibreOffice, on the other hand, has much more competent userbase (in average), and despite the lack of certain features LibreOffice has more positive image.
It would be helpful if you could indicate what is missing or what you mean by correctly importing.
If there are no detailed Word error messages or diagnostics, perhaps you could ask your lawyer to send you a PDF or paper version, so you can tell if there are any differences.
I for one would be very attentive to the possibility of missing or incorrect information in legal documents...
Are you sure your lawyer is even using Word? Many still use word perfect. I was just at the office of a state legislature yesterday and they are 100% a word perfect shop.
In my experience, OpenOffice/LibreOffice screws up non-trivial formatting on import, and Microsoft Office screws up non trivial embeddings from previous versions. I've had both screw up old Word documents.
I prefer LibreOffice when I need to open old files -- the format is often botched, but all the content is always there -- which was not my experience with Microsoft Word.
Also, in my experience LibreOffice will happily open documents Microsoft Office complains about as being corrupt.
I think the aurthors point isn't that there is no point for Office, it is that for a lot of people, they do not need a full suite. My father was a die hard 'I need Office' person, and then he got an HP Touchpad during the firesale. Turns out he just needs basic word processing/spreadsheeting capability, and hasn't opened office on his laptop since.
If Microsoft would have had an app for the Touchpad, he would have bought it, and wouldn't have seen how overpriced and over featured it was for his needs.
This is a crack in Microsoft's armor, and could lead to long term issues.
Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code. Porting it to webOS is a laughable proposition with the amount of devices it sold. And calling it an 'app' is disingenuous, it's a full fledged suite.
Microsoft is right in waiting for things to settle down before wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on such excursions. Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad? After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications.
"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code."
I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office". I know it takes a lot of time and investment, but even if they released a subpar editor that was able to view it, they would have got his money and I highly doubt he would have complained.
"Porting it to webOS is a laughable proposition with the amount of devices it sold."
I agree, and I understand why they wouldn't. My point is that they lost a recurring customer by not creating it. Think of it similar to the police response to a bank robbery. I can guarantee that the cost of the response is several orders of magnitude greater than amount even in the bank, let alone what the thieves are actually able to steal. That is because they are not reacting to the cost of the money being stolen, but to the long term costs of making it seem like anyone can rob a bank. If Microsoft made an App for EVERY platform, regardless of cost, it would be hard for anyone to even penetrate into the marketplace, therefore ensuring longer term success.
Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
"And calling it an 'app' is disingenuous, it's a full fledged suite."
Agreed, was only done for the sake of brevity. Easier than writing "an office app, a powerpoint app, and an excel app"
"Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad?"
Yes, several /years/ after its initial release, despite making up over 90% of the tablet market. Docs to go, a fully featured suite, was released within a couple weeks.
"After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications."
Not sure what you mean, iPad !== Windows arm tablets. And again, everyone expects Windows software of windows hardware. The discussion at hand is Windows software on non windows hardware, which is how they made their millions to begin with.
>"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code." I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office"
Unquestioningly bend to the capricious whims and desires of non-technical users, a winning strategy for any tech business.
Last month a user told me I should add full-fledged accounting and payroll management to my niche software so he doesn't have to buy QuickBooks. Better get cracking!
Obviously I do not believe that you should listen to all user requests, in fact I think that most can be ignored. However, I do not think my dad is unlike a lot of our dads/cousins/in-laws/familynontechie. I truly believe that a majority of non technical people would by "Office™ for X" simply because of the first word, and /that/ is when you start to listen to your customers.
Microsoft is not a niche software company. They dump billions down holes every year for completely fruitless projects. They could have easily bought dataviz, called documents to go Office Mobile, and called it a day.
> My point is that they lost a recurring customer by not creating it. Think of it similar to the police response to a bank robbery. I can guarantee that the cost of the response is several orders of magnitude greater than amount even in the bank, let alone what the thieves are actually able to steal. That is because they are not reacting to the cost of the money being stolen, but to the long term costs of making it seem like anyone can rob a bank. If Microsoft made an App for EVERY platform, regardless of cost, it would be hard for anyone to even penetrate into the marketplace, therefore ensuring longer term success.
I don't think shareholders would appreciate MS throwing money at every platform at launch.
>Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
That is because the search market is huge, whereas Office software for a tablet that only sold when it was a final firesale.. not so much.
And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch.
"I don't think shareholders would appreciate MS throwing money at every platform at launch."
The "Office" market is huge, as well. And they like what makes them money. I am not saying they should do this on every platform, I am saying that they risk losing customers with every platform that comes out that they do not have one for. While my specific example was the touchpad, the same argument applies to the iPad and Android markets.
"And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch."
HP didn't make the touchpad, Palm did. Palm was not an office oriented company, they were a device oriented company. Secondly, Docs to go does it regularly, and has done it for over a decade. Again, this is not about bringing over the codebase to new platforms, it is about branding a product with similar functionality on every platform.
"Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation."
Haven't we had this discussion way too many times before? How many HN stories have there been of "look at the feat of content creation this person pulled off with an iThing!"?
Specific varieties of work are best suited to the desktop computing UI paradigm. That's distinctly different from "iThings are just content consumption devices." It's insufficiently rigorous thinking; also it's bullshit.
Warren Ellis has written tremendous amounts of his serious work on a (non-iOS) mobile device. Mark O'Connor made an iPad his primary coding device [1]. Atomic Tom could perform a song off of just iThings as instruments on the subway.
Please stop repeating the 'mobile devices are just for content consumption' meme. It's bullshit.
EDIT: Also, you'll note that from your own posted link the author had to get a wireless keyboard. There was nothing he accomplished there that couldn't have been done just as well (and possibly more cheaply) using a netbook.
I don't think author means to claim the world has moved on. Early adopters have, and as the tablet replaces the desk/lap-tops with internet everywhere, Office will be irrelevant.
1. Google Docs.
2. Gmail, Google Docs [Free]
3. Google Docs
4. Google Docs can preview / edit. You just need internet.
I haven't used office in ages. I consider myself a fairly early adopter of technology and yes I've moved on. My mom has not, I don't think she ever will.
It's like mobile phones made wrist watch redundant. But people still wear them for:
I work in the legal field and they will never, ever use Google Docs for anything. You do not put important documents on another company's computers and you especially don't do that if they are in the U.S. (They ban dropbox for the same reason).
I wonder if they've consider developing a Google Apps appliance, a contained webserver (physical or virtual) with just a simple API to store and load documents, email, etc. You'd load the software from 'the cloud', which would then call the appliance on the LAN to get your stuff.
Seems to satisfy the privacy requirements while keeping the more maintenance heavy components on their machines.
Tablets won't replace the desktop/laptop. Augment, sure, but they aren't going to kill them off, especially in the workplace. They're different devices with different functions--it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven.
Google Docs is great for consumption, sure, but for creation it's so-so (especially compared with better, dedicated tools), and there's no guarantee it won't be sunsetted when it ceases to help funnel meat into Google's advertising maw.
> it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven
Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.
Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already.
Connecting to peripherals is irrelevant in the tablet takeover. In fact, tablets are irrelevant in the tablet takeover. What's going to happen is that the tablet OS and app ecosystem will reign while the form factor becomes whatever is convenient for the task at hand.
Media consumption? Tablet. Work? Unknown form factor, but with correct input/output attached and running the same software as the media tablet.
"Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already."
Things is, what platform is going to be the best at switching modes between desktop and tablet, with full support for multiple monitors, printing, VPN etc, stuff business will like? Windows 8.
I'm not going to lie--if I could get a job where I flopped out on beanbags and did all my work on a tablet, that'd be pretty nifty. I just don't see using a tablet for content creation and having to sit at a normal desk.
Good point. Perhaps the problem is the work station and not the device itself. Still, the way tablets work now, they have to be at a fairly low angle, or one's hands will quickly get tired. That coupled with lack of real world applications doesn't seem to align very well with tablet's possible ubiquitous future.
Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.
Google Office suite will not be replacing Microsoft Office in the business world for a long time, until Google figures out how to make GOffice properly format and consistently display their documents. I write a lot of sheet music and guitar tablature in GDocs (so I can get to it on a tablet when I get the call that a friend's guitarist didn't show up), and it seems every few months there is an update that breaks the formatting completely.
Granted, writing music in GDocs isn't a common use case, but advanced formatting is the way of business. If Google can't get it right, they can't get business right.
Current Google Docs functionality comparable with WordPad, like it or not. Same for Live office suite, Zoho, etc.
They are just unusable for complex documents containing multiple columns, continuous sections, multilevel lists, multiple page layouts in a document, etc, etc, etc.
The basic stuff such as saving character, paragraph and table styles is not there yet.
I wouldn't say that iStuff fills in your "missing productivity suite", more that for most people the productivity suite wasn't needed to begin with. The browsers text box goes a lot farther than people give it credit for (meta using it right now). Even within corporations once wiki's are introduced (a decade old at this point?) it feels like nearly all of the reason for "docs" to exists disappear overnight. And email is replaceable with hundreds of other solutions. After you remove those two from MS Office what is left isn't a list of applications that everyone uses all of the time. This isn't a case of early adopters either. I rarely use MS office apps and that usage pattern started more than a decade ago.
So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny. I've worked in places that, being that tiny, still refused to setup something that helpful.
As for email--yes, there are hundreds of alternatives, but somehow we keep coming back to email, and when we need to guarantee that somebody else can communicate with us, that's what we use. I've had Skype updates break. I've had Google Chat randomly disappear or be inaccessible. I've had AIM clients (of many varieties) die on me. Email, barring the normal issues you see with it, is always there.
For email specifically referring to the plethora of server and client alternatives such as hotmail, gmail, kmail, procmail, sendmail, email on your phone, etc
>So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny.
This is completely false in my experience.
1) Businesses use wikis all the time. The last 4 places I've worked at have had department wikis. This includes a University, a Mega-Bank, a family owned e-tailer, and a medium-sized consulting firm, which hits just about every size business you can have aside from "start-up".
2) Getting a wiki set up is trivial. For the large companies you request the IT side to give you a VM and an address on the intranet. For the small companies it's usually a spare box and an address on the intranet. It's dead simple.
Also I suspect you would be surprised at how much leeway managers have in choosing collaboration mediums. Email is the old standby, yes, but many managers will choose other ways to collaborate within their department. Most businesses have an IM server for internal chats as well.
I think that depends very much on which large company. Where I work, getting a wiki setup on a machine I don't control would be an absolute nightmare. We're talking conference calls, forms, requirements docs, project numbers, discussions over funding, etc... It would be horrible. It took us 2 years just to get new servers.
Actually, there are box solutions for corporate portals (which I guess include wiki or other communication/knowledge sharing tools). They're kind of a hot topic. Business are adopting.
Businesses deploy internal wikis all the time, they just quickly get abandoned because the managers who decide they are needed don't actually use them themselves.
> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.
I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.
Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.
I very much agree that currently there is no heavy competition to MS Office.
However, I think there is an interesting scenario that during the coming years, tablets and laptops might converge, into "convertible laptops" such as the Asus Transformer prime.
If Apple were to introduce such a device, that ran iOS in tablet mode, but OSX in laptop form, that could be a very real alternative to MS. Apple could then capitalize on the consumer desire for tablets, to move users from MS platform to Mac platform, where Apple have a good office suite in iWork.
Such a scenario could open up real competition on office suites.
Until then though, I agree that iOS or Android won't come anywhere near threatening Office, and it's a bit misguided of the author to announce the coming death of the market leader, based on a few personal experiences by himself and his wife.
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
iWork does okay in this sort of setting. In enterprise there is zero competition for MS Office though. The main hangups are Excel and Outlook (not email, but large group collaboration). Document writing (Word) and presentations (Powerpoint) have mostly been figured out and passed by in some cases.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
I've tried StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, WordPerfect, and every other option available. Nothing comes close to Word in functionality. Sure you can write a few paragraphs and do rich text in any of those options, but if you're doing anything at all complicated you need more.
And yet LibreOffice Calc works as well as Excel in almost every way that I've used it.
And Outlook...I don't know a sysadmin who doesn't hate Outlook or (especially) Exchange. It's true, though, that no one else really has that functionality together in a reasonable package. Talk about a vulnerable product to target, though; I guess GMail is trying to take it down, though I would have a hard time trusting Google to manage all of my email. Nothing against Google, but their tech-support is practically nonexistent, so if there WERE a problem, there's no recourse.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
And you've hit on the main problem with replacing Office. Everyone seems to use 10 different features from each application and those features don't seem to overlap. When I write documents I generally need something simple so my feature set for a writer is simple and mostly covered.
OTOH, I use a lot of Excel features that simply don't exist in other products. A big one used to be pivot tables, but those have been replicated somewhat. The problem is that Excel moved the bar further by adding more features like essentially being a window into MSAS and allowing users to build pivot tables and reports directly from data housed in MSAS.
And yeah, Exchange is a PITA to manage (it has gotten better, 5.5 was a nightmare), but it's still the best group collaboration, email, calendaring, scheduling, whatever else it does platform out there.
Google Apps customers (i.e. people who are replacing Exchange with gmail) have access to tech support for Gmail. The folks who respond are pretty good (as tech support folks go).
I sometimes make the joke with my business friends "What type of Office suite are you?". Because all their jobs basically come down to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, or a combination of all three.
Those tools are still used big time in the business world (which is magnificently bigger than this community).
It's not just the tools that are used. As Microsoft (and OpenOffice folks) understood in the 90's, it's all about file formats.
On one hand, you have things like CSV which Excel understands but doesn't prefer... easily generatable from a database or flat-file even using comamnd line cut/sed/awk.
On the other hand you have XLS(X) - which a TON of enterprise software generates - because it works better on Excel (lockin!) and supports things CSV doesn't (multi-sheet files, formatting, even pivot tables and such).
To win or even compete in this space you need to support the file formats - Apple's Numbers supports XLSX, but the feature support is minimal and lots of edge-conditions that are not present when using Excel crop up here (as with Libre/OpenOffice).
In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
Is there honestly any real competition in that field from tablets and iStuff and the like? No. Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but work is done on a desktop, where you need to do a lot of typing and clicking. The interface is simply better for that.
Moreover, Microsoft Office has pretty much nailed its niche: I challenge you to find a better office suite. Here's what you'll have to do:
1. Find me an office suite that works out-of-the-box.
2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email, database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet, simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
3. Find me an office suite that does (2) fairly well.
4. Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
There's some nifty stuff on the net as thin clients running in HTML5. There's some cool stuff happening in tablets. But the author is sorely mistaken in presuming that the world has somehow moved past Office.
EDIT: And yes, I've tried Google Docs and OpenOffice and WordPerfect and all these things--but for raw "get the bidness done" Office is pretty much it.
EDIT2: And Word's spellchecker could've saved me. >:(