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"Exclusive: Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android revealed"
Reply to: by iheke
Firstly, as mentioned above Microsoft are still a software company (yes, Xbox division is going on gangbusters and they’re dabbling in search) amazingly ppl seem to forget that – their ultimate aim has to be ubiquitousness (and getting ppl to pay for it).
Secondly, some ppl here are trying to play both sides of an argument here. It has long been said that Office on a phone has limited use cases for anyone but the most extreme commercial user dying to edit documents/spreadsheets on the go. So all this whining about how this harms their WP8 platform is just that – whining. Microsoft has probably had a good 3 years of large corporate clients saying “my end users need office” to which their answer has been get stuffed. These corporations have users on blackberries, android, and ios devices and in order for them to make even the most rudimentary changes to a document requires them to send the document to an external service (IT security guys – shudder now) convert the document and then send it back to the office (possibly by insecure email again -another shudder). Now there’s an answer, on device editing – IT systems guys need only hand out codes to staff that need the feature. The trick they’ve pulled is including the consumer app in what in my mind is a corporate app.
The one criticism is the pricing on an Office365 subs. No, not that its too high – the floor for Office is now pretty consistent at $99/£50 – its the fact that there is a penalty for going digital in the form of an annual subscription. If an individual bought Office Home and Student that would serve them up until they upgraded or kicked the proverbial. $99 a year does seem gouging for those consumers – and someone somewhere inside microsoft should be thinking of a one-off fee to prevent some moaning about that too.
Reply to: by iheke
Firstly, as mentioned above Microsoft are still a software company (yes, Xbox division is going on gangbusters and they’re dabbling in search) amazingly ppl seem to forget that – their ultimate aim has to be ubiquitousness (and getting ppl to pay for it).
Secondly, some ppl here are trying to play both sides of an argument here. It has long been said that Office on a phone has limited use cases for anyone but the most extreme commercial user dying to edit documents/spreadsheets on the go. So all this whining about how this harms their WP8 platform is just that – whining. Microsoft has probably had a good 3 years of large corporate clients saying “my end users need office” to which their answer has been get stuffed. These corporations have users on blackberries, android, and ios devices and in order for them to make even the most rudimentary changes to a document requires them to send the document to an external service (IT security guys – shudder now) convert the document and then send it back to the office (possibly by insecure email again -another shudder). Now there’s an answer, on device editing – IT systems guys need only hand out codes to staff that need the feature. The trick they’ve pulled is including the consumer app in what in my mind is a corporate app.
The one criticism is the pricing on an Office365 subs. No, not that its too high – the floor for Office is now pretty consistent at $99/£50 – its the fact that there is a penalty for going digital in the form of an annual subscription. If an individual bought Office Home and Student that would serve them up until they upgraded or kicked the proverbial. $99 a year does seem gouging for those consumers – and someone somewhere inside microsoft should be thinking of a one-off fee to prevent some moaning about that too.