MS is changing, and make no mistake, this has started with Ballmer. If you watch(ed) the press conf, it's quite apparent. App store for Android, Office for iPad, AD for Azure.. quite nice stuff, that's what we expect from a software giant: just release stuff for everything, everywhere, and make things be able to work with each other nicely.
Good to see that, competition is always good for the users, and Apple, Google and MS all seem to be quite strong on their fields (although Google is the most fashionable nowadays).
That Microsoft is broadening where and how customers can use Office is interesting.
But what's shocking is that the first tablet-optimized version of Office is arriving not on Windows RT, but on iOS. That speaks volumes about the state of Windows today – and about how Nadella is under no illusions.
Office for iPad may have started under Ballmer, but it's hard to imagine it getting this high a priority without his successor making what I'm sure was a tough call.
I think that it's a good strategy for Microsoft to make its software run on other platforms. This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's not even the early 2000's with the "I'm a Mac vs. I'm a PC" meme. Now there are multiple popular platforms (at least in the consumer market), none with clear dominance, and meanwhile Microsoft's software only works on their own platform.
They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.
It still dominates overwhelmingly in enterprise, but at homes? People might have a windows box, but lots of older adults (people over 40) just use an iPad in front of the TV instead.
And anyone over 60 is still using an XP laptop from 2002.
Most people have a computer in their home. If they graduated to mobile devices, they didn't just chuck the thing in the trash, they kept it around. They still probably get photos off their camera or print coupons on it, because AirPrint and whatever Androids 4.4 printing thing is are barely known about, crummy, and only supported on a fraction of devices
it speaks to the amazing power of marketing. People are always blown away when they find out that apple has less than a 10% market share and that their market share has actually gone down over the last 10 years.
Your post speaks to the amazing power of something, not sure what. Apple's market share of what? Is below what? Where? Among whom? Has dropped since when?
It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.
There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish)
Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple.
Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing
I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.
since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware
For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!
I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.
That's mostly all good and fair. I don't have any data to contribute. But the I think my fundamental point is good:
PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.
You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).
Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners.
So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.
I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.
When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.
No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.
Their marketing is funded by their dominant profit margin; before, people think market share equates to higher earnings, but apple shows that even with a small market share you can have a dominant profit margin and earnings, which is what really matter.
A most truthful argument. However I think that in relation to the OP its important to ask Cui Bono. This is most definitely to the benefit of apple and its shareholder, and so reflects less value to the overall population of technology users.
Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)
Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market
market -> all the people
encompasses your share
share -> using your stuff
Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.
If more people are buying product A, but product B has a longer useful life, then it conceivable for product B to have a higher usage share.
The problem is that usage share is a lot harder to measure than market share. But ultimately it's the more important number when it comes to things like network effect and developer and consumer mindshare.
Market share actually does in some respect account for a sum of existing products in use, how that is calculated will depend on the reporting entity.
Usage share turns out to be super easy to capture these days, we do it by looking at the browser string of a request to a web server. Most big sites are putting out this type of data so a relatively clear picture emerges.
For a company like microsoft or apple market share is a more useful measure because it helps them plan/predict their supply chain so that they have the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time.
But from a developer perspective usage share is more interesting for obvious reasons.
In this case the numbers are still basically the same.
Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.
So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free.
How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.
rodgerd, this comment really annoys me. It comes across so smug and, IMO, so wrong.
Windows is not the dominant computing platform, because PCs are not the dominant computing platform. Smartphones have been outselling PCs since 2011 – not even considering tablets. Windows is obviously still the dominant PC OS, but unlike the 1990's, that doesn't make it the dominant platform.
This is an article about Microsoft releasing Office for smartphone and tablet OSes. To ignore them from your evaluation of the "dominant platform" seems foolish.
In the world, outside the bubble, there are still more people using PCs to do stuff than pretty much any other device. That looks like it's in the process of changing. But the only people who think it already has are folks living in a very particular slice of reality.
Windows is the dominant computing platform. Smartphone sales are irrelevant. Most of the top selling apps on either app stores are entertainment apps and other tiny apps that are mildly relevant. The majority of non-web businesses in the world could survive a temporary internet shutdown but not if windows went away tomorrow. There is nothing dominant (yet) about iOS or Android in the way that Windows was and is.
In a limited way. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Communicator (i/o Lync) are available for Mac, but they are not even close to the Windows versions in terms of feature parity. VBA support has been on-and-off. Access, Infopath, and Publisher are not available at all. They're written in Cocoa and on a different release cycle. There is no Office for Mac 2013, current version is 2011.
With One Note for Mac and now this, I'm actually excited for the next release of Office for Mac, it's looking like it's going to be really good!
I'm sick of Outlook on OSX (it's the only Office app I use), I can add rules, but I can't add notifications so I miss all of my emails. Now I've turned it off I have to manually order things.
On top of that I'm stuck with Calibri as the default font. The default can't be changed.
For 95%+ of their user base, Word, Powerpoint and Excel have feature parity on the Mac/Windows. Outlook and Lync are significantly superior on the Windows Platform.
Excel had a pretty nasty regression on the Macintosh in Office 2004/2008 (to the point at which I no longer used it on the Mac in 2008, it was pretty horrid) - but they returned it to (mostly) feature parity as of Office 2011.
Sharepoint, on the other hand, is complete crap on a Macintosh. It's almost like it's been designed to be bad.
"It is at least a different product, not better or worse."
The very fact that it's different makes it worse for me. I can use Excel 2010 for Windows without thinking about the tool. Small differences like startup behaviour, position of things on the ribbon, and keyboard shortcut force me to think about how to use Excel for Mac, rather than focusing on the task at hand.
Some, but not all, of this is down to differences in the platform and platform-specific design conventions.
It has. And it was pretty good. Ironically at the time it was made available it was part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back (See we are supporting another platform! wink wink) My how times have changed.
Microsoft made Office for the mac long before that deal was made, and it was only done as a show of confidence for the Mac platform; Apple didn't really need the money (they had more than few billion in the bank, were still profitable, and far from death). To paraphrase Mark Twain, "news of Apple's impending death had been greatly exaggerated."
>> part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back
Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.
"At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple." - People forget back then that if MSFT dropped Office support for Apple it would have been a significant blow.
- Then Steve Jobs himself. I think these specifics support my initial comment.
"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.
So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again."
"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."
Hey BugBrother. MSFT could have a) Settled and written a check for $500 mil and b) stopped supporting Office on the Mac the next day and it's likely Apple would be a business school case study about how you fall into the ashes.Back at that time the only people using Macs in the corporate environment were talented people buried away in the marketing department doing unique design work. They were the only people who were tolerated by corporate IT (and then often begrudgingly so) And the only reason they could even keep using their Macs in this Windows XP world was because they could at least exchange Word/PowerPoint and Excel docs from the 98% of the employees using Windows. Add to that all the independent and small consulting shops who had to accept Office Docs from their corporate clients. MSFT's support for Office on the Mac was lukewarm at best leading up to this. Mac users lived in real fear that at any point MSFT would simply drop support for the Mac. It would have been a deathblow. A few hundred million for some code infringement (and it would only have been that based on the dynamics you list) would have simply forestalled the inevitable.
You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?
But ok, I can comment:
As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.
Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.
I could also note, re your claims about Office and corporate environments, that there were virtual machines that ran Windows and Office.
An anecdote:
One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)
I believe that is more because of Apple than because of Microsoft. Apple has a history of being pretty convincing towards these crucial applications. I believe Microsoft got out of a anti-trust suit from Apple if they agreed to release Office for Mac. And Apple has a love/hate relationship with Adobe too, in a similar way.
It's kind of funny, though. Jobs was pragmatic enough to realize that it was better to get Microsoft to "open up" than to win the lawsuit. It's hard to say, but I definitely think it paid off.
I can't think of any companies who sell software for other platforms that are making anywhere in the same neighborhood as companies that own the platform. Microsoft doesn't want to become another Adobe.
Well, capturing profit in tech is all about commoditizing your proprietary product's complements, without allowing others to commoditize your product.
Apple made their money selling proprietary hardware, first computers, then mobile devices.
Microsoft made their money selling proprietary operating systems while commoditizing hardware (PCs).
Google made their money selling proprietary advertising on commodity software on commodity devices. Browsers were already a commodity, they're commoditizing operating systems by doing everything through the web browser, and they're commoditizing mobile devices with Android.
Now Microsoft is trying to get into the mobile device market, after Google already commoditized it, a strategy that's doomed to failure.
They're also trying to get into the data center and IaaS/PaaS market, but that's already been somewhat commoditized by Amazon, Google, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc.
The companies that are still making money off a proprietary platform, are doing it because they haven't allowed it to be commoditized yet. MS still makes most of their money from platform lock-in in the corporate market, but as soon as that product gets commoditized, their goose is cooked.
So sure, Microsoft doesn't want to become just a software shop like Adobe, but then, it doesn't look like they really have much of a choice in the matter.
Microsoft Office is broadly used throughout the business world.
Adobe sells to an industry niche of creative professionals. That's a substantially different situation. A lot more computers have Word installed than Photoshop.
But what is still missing is a Metro version of Office. Historically, Office has always been the showcase on how to build proper Windows applications, it's where UI innovations are first introduced: i.e. embedding, multiple document interface, icon bar, ribbon.
Since the introduction of the Metro ('modern') UI, Microsoft has not been able to really show the power and possibilities of it. Office for Metro should fix this, and show people how Metro is superior to the iOS and Android UI. Supposedly Office Metro has been in development for years (project Gemini), but as it turns out: it's not ready. And Office for iPad is.
I hope we'll hear more about office for Metro soon, maybe next week at Build?
I read that the Office branch of Microsoft allows exactly zero libraries and lines of code that they do not control. They use their own C-compiler, everything. That also means that they first need to copy Metro before they are prepared to use it. I can imagine that is quite a big task.
The office on my surface is just the desktop one without any optimization for touch screens. Edit: and yes, I do not think that the "touch optimized features" they are describing on that site is enough for a real rt app.
The Office for iPad looks much more optimized for touch screen devices, rather than having minor adjustments made to Office for desktop that RT looks to be using.
I'm guessing the usability differences are night and day between the two devices.
This would be an incredibly interesting development. I personally love c# and would be thrilled if it became a mainstream language outside the enterprise software crowd.
Yes, this would be amazing. C# and F# are great programming languages, and it would earn a lot of developer goodwill if Microsoft decided to officially support the effort to break these languages out of the Windows ghetto.
C# and F# are great languages, but there are a lot of utterly terrible things in the .NET framework that need to be maintained... I don't envy Miguel in supporting all Microsoft's various false-start libraries.
I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.
I mean, it doesn't really even make sense to have a closed-source application programming language in this day and age, where the community building and maintaining it is entirely employed by a single company. It just isn't efficient enough, the maintenance is intractable, and you end up with false starts because the whole thing is subject to the whims and shifting priorities of management.
Besides, Sun open-sourced Java back in 2006, already...
Sure, but you can feel free to never use or support the false starts. In open source they are allowed to die. In a closed ecosystem they have a tendency to live on as deprecated zombies.
Which is really good, because at Microsoft's size, there's often a non-trivial number of companies who drank the kool-aid and invest hundreds of man-years to building a system using those false starts.
Not even just companies, but also governments and entire countries.
Since the late 1990s, South Korea has had a law that any website transmitting any sort of banking/financial data was required to use a specific ActiveX plugin for encryption. This law was in place for years after ActiveX was officially deprecated, and I believe that it has only just recently been amended to allow other crypto implementations.
I've got working asp.net ecommerce solutions, but for my last project went back to Java/Dropwizard/IntelliJ - it is just way better dev exp. + perf is much better on Linux.
MS will be not interested in supporting competing (Windows Server/MS SQL vs Linux / PostgreSQL) server platform - it's sad but true.
That sounds to me like a reference to some boxed product running ASP.NET. Possibly aspDotNetStorefront? If so, that competes with PHP platforms for being a mess of code and non-sense design decisions.
I can hear people talking about Scala, Ruby, Node and saying better performance + dev experience (whether I agree or not) -- but Java? Not flaming here, that just doesn't sound like a well informed statement.
meh sorry - I mean: working ASP.NET mono ecommerce (no, not aspDotNetStorefront - ASP.NET MVC app on green field). I started when Mono was in Novell's hands and hoped they will push harder for C#/Web/Linux but it didn't happen and now Xamarin is interested solely in mobile so it's even less reasonable to use Mono for web on Linux these days. Don't get me wrong I admire Mono guys but Monodevelop (even recent versions) is just not IntelliJ level IDE and Java with it is not so bad (especially Java8). Maybe I would go with ROR or Python but it's SPA (Dart on client side) so Java is just webservice (Dropwizard makes it frictionless)
I agree, but it still has a ways to go. They are embracing open-source more and more, but they need to spend time making it easy for open source developers to make their projects work well on windows. Usually with multi-platform development, vagrant is one of the best solutions out there, however the support for using Windows VMs with vagrant is horrific.
If anyone at Microsoft is reading this thread, please for the love of god spend some time on vagrant-windows, the WinRM gem and making it easy for us to make open-source projects available on windows. It's a nice gesture to make InternetExplorer VMs available for website testing, but if you can't easily automate the testing via tools like vagrant it's really only half a solution.
That's a step in the right direction, but don't make us use Hyper-V when most of us are already using VirtualBox. That's one more thing to add to my stack that is different than my tooling that works with all other operating systems I test on. Most developers using vagrant use VirtualBox. Now I have no problem if you make things work with Hyper-V, but please make things work with VirtualBox as well. Does hyper-v even run on Linux or OS X?
PS that link isn't loading for me.
PSS if you are an MS engineer working on this stuff, can you please contact me via the email in my profile. I didn't see an email in yours.
Near as I can tell the issue has to do with the WinRM gem, which I'd debug myself, but looking at the source and what it does, I am woefully unequipped to debug that issue without spending a lot of time that I should be spending on other work. I'm simply too far removed from the Windows world to even know where to begin.
And they are changing good... For example, i'm Bizspark and i have 115 €/ month sponsored by Microsoft for using Azure (for a max of 3 years)... And it's a great platform to..
I needed help from some of them to transfer management (have my own domain name now). He called me within 2 hours, the same evening he watched my screen and we followed the additional required steps (wouldn't have found those steps solo i'm affraid).
Great and fast support, i guess that's why Microsoft is "enterprise".
(ps. Subscription wasn't hard, you have to explain your idea and what you're trying to build. Then you get access to Media Services, Virtual Machines, ...)
That will be interesting to see if they actually release Office on Linux distros should the Linux desktop become more popular (and that's kind of expected).
They'll go where the money is. But its not been established that Linux is anything other than a services sector. So far nobody has managed to sell consumer software on Linux in a big way. Maybe some tiny games and whatnot here and there, but, Microsoft will (and probably should) ignore any market that won't bring in atleast a hundred million in revenue.
Is this good to see? They are changing because they had to, or they risk becoming irrelevant. Windows Mobile is not taking off as fast as you would expect, so if they don't move to iOS or Android, someone else will fill that void.
And office is becoming worse, merging is awful, online editing is completely broken (saving.... saving.... saving....)
Microsoft is a software company, and Office is one of their biggest products. Why would they make it free? While they do give out OneNote for free, it is not a major part of Office. Making Word, excel, and PowerPoint free would hurt them much more than it would help them.
The same reason a friendly drug dealer would offer a first hit free: to get you hooked.
Once you have a bunch of important documents locked up in Office file formats -- which Office is the only app guaranteed to be able to read reliably -- you have a great incentive down the road to start sending money to Microsoft so you can continue to access them.
It is because people like me are in the process of switching over to iWork because my on the go platform is an iPad. I am still in the middle of the transition, and this will make me reconsider.
I agree with XDes that corporations like MS should make money. My negative reaction is that I do not like the subscription model for software. Perhaps that's what amaks viscerally reacts to as well.
Subscriptions bleed money from users continually, regardless of how often they use something. Paying for major upgrades only allows the user to upgrade based on whether they need certain features and potentially skip every other update or so if they use the software only lightly.
For example, my personal at-home copy of MS Office is the 2003 version. I use it so rarely that this does not matter, especially with other options available that can view and edit MS Office documents.
I stopped using VMWare Fusion, for example, because they got into the habit of releasing paid upgrade versions that were required in order to run on Apple's new OS X version. Perhaps it's not their fault that Apple's OS updates broke VMWare's virutalization, but I don't use this often enough at home to want to pay for an upgrade every year. Before I would pay for an upgrade every 2 or 3 years. Now I've switched to VirtualBox at home.
For business use, software is used much more often and it matters a lot more to have it up-to-date. So in that case a yearly subscription might make sense.
Exactly. Microsoft is after the business users who will throw the subscription on expenses without a second thought. Personal use for something like this is likely not a huge market; google docs is good enough, and free, for that.
So corporations aren't supposed to make money from their products? Google docs does not work well on the iPad and I would love something that conforms to the iPad properly.
Is a starting price of $7/mo that egregious? That's around what I pay for my minimal Github account.
If you really use Office every day during the workday, it's worth the money. The $15/m that my company pays per user for our 365 account is well worth the money.
> It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.
I don't understand why that was downvoted. Office 365 is expensive...compared to a one-time purchase you own forever. I don't understand why users aren't showing more resistance to subscription-based software (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.)...it's as if people enjoy getting screwed over.
I wonder if they aren't a little late on this. I assume that I'm not the only one that found out I can get along just fine without Office on an iPad (or in my own personal case, get along just fine without Office at all). If the free Pages/Keynote/Numbers doesn't do it, I probably need a "real" computer anyway.
That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices anyway, despite their lack of Office. Then folks find out that they can do what they want to do despite that lack of Office. Maybe they've been using it by default, not because they really need it. Then Microsoft comes out with Office for iOS and there's a collective shrug and a "meh".
I have yet to see any iOS app doing a reliable job in even just displaying Excel and Word documents.
A long time ago I thought that LibreOffice or Pages were close enough, good enough to not need Office, but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place. It might be 98% OK, but you can't always afford to give up on the 2% of information your are missing.
Forcing Office users to give a sensible version of the files when sharing is the best solution, but having a native iOS version of Office for when that's not an option is invaluable.
but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place
We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.
IMO the issue is more with the document format than what people are doing with it. The most recurrent problem I've seen was with text that was deleted at some point appearing instead of the current version.
What I'd really want in the first place is people to care if what they are sharing is in the right format.
When a non technical clients asks a designer to see some early drafts of a site's UI, they will usually receive rendered jpg or png files, not Photoshop or Illustrator files. Most school teachers would be pissed of if students were to turn in home assignments in tex. I find it inconsiderate to send me docx files for documents that are read only on my side, just send me the PDF instead.
I agree with you. I think people have diversified. Office isn't going away, but their prolonged absence on other platforms opened some doors that they can't close again.
I've seen much more openness to other document formats across industries. It's a bit like BYOD in enterprise, but at the document level. For example, it's been 5 years since I've been at a conference that requires slides to be PPT.
They will probably always own the high end: advanced documents for the 20% of knowledge workers that need those features; custom Enterprise workflows, etc. But fewer and fewer people will ever require access to the Office Suite in any form.
If you can get along without Office, then you are not their target customer. The marketing and sales folk at my company are so dependent on (and skilled with) Excel that it would surprise most techies to see what they can do with what we consider very primitive tools.
This is a good move, and Microsoft has always been better as the underdog, they've just been away from that role for a long time.
The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit.
Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.
If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w/r/t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.
Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it's vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.
Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221
If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.
Facebook will even auto-link Office documents that you send via the Messages interface to the online web viewer (from the "See Full Conversation" pane, that is).
I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)
But if I'm alone using it, that's not 5 users. That will be $100/yr for 1 user. And that appears to be expensive in general.
A cracked version will come with editing capabilities, make no mistake. I'd gladly once pay a fair amount of money for a version with edit and without subscription.
It's expensive because it has competition that is charging less. The actual price doesn't matter that much given consumers are free to choose alternatives.
That said, $100/yr is extremely expensive in most countries in the world.
There is a trend towards the "subscription model". We've seen it with Adobe's suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.
The trend toward subscription model is generally misguided. When you buy software, you are pre-paying the whole amount upfront. Plus your chance of defecting to competitor in near future (aka subscriptio "churn") is almost zero. Plus when you get new product with new features out, customer has a good justification to repeat the whole cycle again.
Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition.
Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
I think you are vastly underestimating how much effort would be required to create software with similar feature sets to what Adobe's has.
I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.
It does, but if I send someone a link to a Google doc (or, for that matter, an iWork doc), I know that they can edit it and send it back to me. No amount of non-suckiness can overcome that.
And even if they are, how often do you send documents to people looking for edits in a situation where you can't assume that they have access to Word? It's pretty much standard issue.
Office 365 is downright cheap compared to Adobe's subscription offerings: $600/year or $75/month.
Granted, that gives you access to a huge suite of applications. But if you only need, say, three of them, you can subscribe individually, which at $20/app/month, would cost you a mere $720/year!
And unlike Office, which is still available as a desktop app without a subscription, Adobe has discontinued its entire non-subscription-based suite.
Office 365 may be a bargain for some people, but that is much more than I have been sending to MS over the last few years. As a student this will make me start paying more and its looking a lot more like a cell phone bill than a one time purchase.
For a family of two, we are happily using about 3 subscriptions. You can add a friend or family for the un-used of the 5 subscriptions. Just one mail for invitation and they have it.
The simplicity of the sharing the subscriptions made me a believer.
There will always be people who will complain about the cost of subscription for both XBL and Office 365, but I think it is reasonably priced at least in the US.
It's somewhat expensive at first sight for an individual, but it's a pretty phenomenal pricing for a family. Lets you buy 1 "license" and it works on up to 5 Macs/PCs and 5 mobile devices/tablets.
2 parents + 3 kids? Not bad. Not sure what the stance is on doing some "framily" thing where you share it with friends.
It's not even that bad for many individuals - let's face it, many of us have more than one computer, so being able to install Office on all of them is quite nice. And I have to admit, the SkyDrive, er, OneDrive integration works quite well - I'm able to update documents on one of my computers and then not have to worry at all about getting the latest changes to another computer, my phone, or tablet.
And even the 60 Skype minutes has come in handy when I've needed to make international calls.
I'm still not a huge fan of applications I'm used to buying once every few years moving to the subscription model, but admittedly there are some positives with what MS has done here.
Good point, but it should be possible to overcome this for an online document. Free accounts could only be able to edit other people's documents, for example.
That's what I wonder, too, but I dare not give a definite answer.
Microsoft has tried to displace PDF before (with XPS), so I'm sure they will be happy if they could take something away from Adobe. One thing I'm willing to take a stab at: it won't happen overnight or even in a year.
Some comments here refer the potencially high cost of the membership for Office 365. It seems like there will be a new plan for $7/m ($70/y) supporting 2 devices[1]. Like the previous plan, it also seems to include 1h of Skype calls.
Before anybody thinks this is weird, or unusual. Microsoft has quite often been more pragmatic about the platform offerings for their office suite than elsewhere. After all, Office exists and has existed on Apple products for a very long time. It's more unusual that it hasn't been on the iProducts than anything.
I may be remembering wrong, but isn't the fact that Office existed on the Mac for so long also a result of the deal that Microsoft and Apple struck back in the 90's? Microsoft would keep making Office for the Mac and in exchange Apple would drop it's patent suit against them.
"I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success." -- Steve Jobs.
Reading between the lines, a less polite version is that Jobs went to Bill Gates and said, "I need a lifeline. Apple is circling the drain. You are going to throw me that lifeline. We are going to do a deal whereby I drop our patent suits against you, and in return you invest in Apple and support us with Office, and say we're best buddies in public. Or else I wind up Apple as a computer company and spend the remaining billion dollars in our accounts on turning Apple into the biggest, baddest patent troll ever. And I will go kamikaze on your ass, and there will be blood and screaming and absolutely no mercy, because I offered you this deal and you turned it down and I remember my enemies forever. Oh and by the way, the DOJ anti-trust folks will be watching. Deal or no deal?"
(This is quite distinct from the 1983/84 Jobs/Gates deal whereby Steve gave Bill an exclusive to be the first office app vendor on the Mac -- as described in "Fire in the Valley" and elsewhere -- which is how Word for Mac got started.)
No, Word and Excel started out on the Mac and came to Windows later. I think what you're referring to is, there was a deal in the '90s where Microsoft helped out Apple, which included investment and maintaining an Internet Explorer Mac port (this was a much bigger deal back then). This gave the company some breathing room. At the time Apple was circling the drain and everyone assumed that they would be out of business in a matter of years if not months. This was the same era as Microsoft's antitrust suits, so what Microsoft got out of it was a (very weak at the time) competitor that they could continue pointing to as evidence that they weren't a monopoly.
According to WP, it started as a Xenix application, made its way over to DOS (to compete with WordPerfect or WordStar IIR), then Mac, then a few other platforms before finally ending up on Windows in 89.
Word and Excel started on the Mac as Steve asked Bill to provide them for MacOS in 1984 or so. Windows was not a viable platform until at least 1989 but by 1992 Office was complete and on its way to domination.
I think you're confusing the $150 million dollar 'loan', the settlement of the lawsuits, and Office, which is reasonable confusion based on how unclear the whole thing was.
A review comparing the Apple apps (native and cloud), MSFT Office (native and cloud), and Google Docs compare would be interesting. Specifically usability (touch as well as external keyboard attached), on and offline modes.
Playing up the ribbon in the presentation? Curious as ribbon really has triggered a love it or hate it reaction.
I don't think it would be unfair. If we're competing in the same space and you have a solid, mature app and all I have is a buggy beta, that means you're winning.
> Curious as ribbon really has triggered a love it or hate it reaction.
What do you hate about it? I find it to be just a bigger toolbar.
The thing I care about the most is UI responsiveness, so Apple's iOS (upto 6, hate 7) UI has always impressed me with its fluidity. Google is web based which I hate the most. I cant understand how any sane person could use a shitty bloated web app over a high performance native application.
It's great to see Office on iPad - hopefully it'll encourage Google to improve their terrible Drive app.
Our company moved entirely to Google Docs about 5 years ago. Being sent a Word file is like being handed a CD ROM - a brief moment for a 'Oh, one of those' mental gear change and a few minutes rummaging in the dead tech box for an external drive. Or in Office's case something that can reliably parse the file
Finally. Yes, there are alternatives to Microsoft Office for the iPad, but make no mistake, none of them even come close to that of Microsoft Office. I just downloaded Word and Excel, couldn't find a flaw in either of them. The subscription part for editing sucks, but subscriptions are fairly cheap.
We are witnessing a new Microsoft that began when new CEO Satya Nadella took the helm. This is his first of many acts to turn the company around, instead of the previous closed door approach Balmer preferred.
It's good to see Satya doesn't appear to be full brainwashed by the Microsoft cool-aid. This isn't 1998, Windows is no longer the dominant platform and it makes sense to open up your products to other platforms, especially given Microsoft's failure to break ground in the mobile market.
Now all Satya needs to do is bring back the start menu in Windows 9, get rid of that horrid Metro tile interface for non touch devices (or at the very least give users the option of the new Metro interface or classic desktop) and I'll be ecstatic.
If that subscription model takes be ready for Windows 9 to come as an Ad Supported Free Version and a paid version that costs 100 bucks a year cause you were so onboard with continuously paying for office for years on end.
As a long time MS customer their pricing strategies and product segmentation still bother the heck out of me. I get it, but I don't. I wish they'd flatten the offering to one OS and one Office suite and be done with it. Here's what's happening with the tablet versions of Office:
A qualifying Office 365 subscription is required to edit and create documents.
Qualifying plans include:
Office 365 Home
$99.99 PER YEAR
Office 365 Small Business Premium
$150.00 per user per year
Office 365 Midsize Business
$180.00 per user per year
Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government)
$264.00 per user per year
Office 365 Education A3 and A4
Students: $36.00 per user per year
Teachers: $72.00 per user per year
Office 365 Pro Plus
$?????
Office 365 University
Same as educational license?
Not sure how to think about this. If I had to pay for my Office 2003 and 2007 Office Pro legal licenses every year it'd amount to a large pile of money. I don't have any issues licensing software at all. You could buy a couple of top of the line German cars with the various licenses for engineering and office software we have.
That said, monthly subscriptions I avoid like the plague. Why? All is fine while business is good. When things aren't great subscriptions bleed much-needed capital. If cancelling your subscriptions means taking away such things as Office and email you are screwed and have to take money from some other part of the business to keep them going.
That's why I've always run our own email servers and always purchased licenses of software like Office Pro. We don't have to update the software every year. When things are good --and if it makes sense-- you upgrade. During lean times you have the option to not spend any money on upgrades and still have full usage of your software. Having experienced this a couple of times over the years I don't like the idea of any mission critical service being tied to a monthly per-user licence, it's a bad idea.
Beyond that, I wish MS would stop this nonsense of having so many layers to their products. One Windows and one Office, none of this "Home", "Home Premium", "Pro", "Pro Plus", "Really Really Pro Premium Plus", etc.
It goes to show a lot about the situation in Microsoft that they didn't manage to ship this last year for Surface RT, where it might have done the platform a lot of good.
I think that it is cool for Microsoft to release Office 360 for OS X and iPad.
I do a lot of writing (I am pretty much addicted to writing books). I use my iPad for lots of casual writing using a good text editor and markdown files in Dropbox (target is leanpub.com). For some writing I like having Pages on both iOS and OS X with iCloud storage.
If Office 360 ends up being a compelling product for iPad and my MacBook Air, then the $99/year is a no-brainer decision.
Looks like the non-tablet iPhone/Android phone versions of Office Mobile have gone free to use as well, forgoing the previous requirement of an active Office 365 subscription:
While we're talking about Microsoft, it strikes me that of the big players in 2014, Microsoft are the most diversified, even if they're no longer in the lead in most areas. Will that diversification (Office, Windows, Enterprise, Azure, XBox, Phones) give them more longevity? Or are they really in danger of fading into insignificance?
I'm wondering what would happen if, without paying for the office 365 subscription, I try to edit a document stored in the cloud. Will it open a Safari tab with the free office.com online Word/Excel/Powerpoint ?
In other words : Is there an "Open with Word Online" button for non office 365 subscribers?
full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Office Online team
I do not believe that feature is in Office for iPad and you should be able to point your browser to OneDrive.com/office.com to get to your documents using Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote Online in the meantime.
This is a really interesting idea though so I'll bring it up with the team, thanks!
I wonder if Apple gets a cut of the subscription pricing.
I also bet any other company would not get away with a model like that. Apple requires that you make payments through their AppStore or in-app Payment systems so it can collect its cut. Good luck trying to publishing something with the same model on the App Store.
It looks like Office 365 subscriptions are available as an In-App Purchase (seen on the sidebar here : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-excel-for-ipad/id5... ), so Apple get their cut of the revenue and Microsoft are above-the-board in terms of App Store regulations.
Naturally if you buy a subscription from outside the app, Apple don't get a cut - that's how everything works and as long as you don't give the user a way to get to the non-Apple subscription payment system from inside the app, Apple is fine with that.
Sidebar: Apple does not allow you to provide a link to a website where you can market or upgrade a SaaS app that does not use the app store subscription model. Does anyone have any experience with denoting features which are locked to paid users without running afoul of this rule?
If it means we will have an actual word processor on iOS, all the better.
I for one am deeply disappointed with the direction Apple has taken with iWork.
Not least of which is the (a) removal of features and (b) incompatibility with recent versions of their own software [this has rendered large portions of my documents unreadable]
It is with a certain amount of amusement that I note that this version of office (which looks really cool) is significantly more optimized for touch than the version of office that I have for my MS Surface. That is some what disappointing.
Nice... But lets look at the facts. 180 million ipads (of any generation, not all will be able to run this new version of office) currently in circulation. 110 million windows 8 PC's active as of sept 2013.... so yes I agree that microsoft should put their money where their market share is... THEIR market share not apple's, with the decline of xp that number of winodws 8 users is expected to sky rocket... so ya it would be nice to have an updated consistent version of office.
Just because a PC is sold with Win8 (because prior versions aren't available) doesn't mean people are using it as such. They had to bring back "boot to desktop" as a configuration option, and 60% of win8 machines launch metro less than once a day (https://www.soluto.com/reports).
so case and point, metro is a pretty cool in function but lacks the apps to make it truly useful... So maybe the company trying to push it should make some. also you cited a link to a 404 page.... and additionally only someone not on windows 8 would believe a statistic like that its not possible to use many of the features of the OS without going into the metro interface... I am hoping that maybe your quote is that "60% of windows 8 machines launch metro apps less than once a day" but that seems like a statistic without a method of measure...
All Metro apps are launched in a hosting process. Thus, the Soluto software would simply look for that particular process EXE to determine if Metro apps are launched.
However, most OS features do not trigger a new hosting process. For example, connecting to a Wi-Fi network, or opening the charms. (Control Panel would get detected as a Metro app, but how many people open Control Panel every day?)
So while it's not perfect, it is possible to make a first stab at measurement.
Updated the link. Soluto manages PCs so they collect metrics on that type of thing. There's probably some sample bias, but it shows the general trend (along with the damning evidence that Microsoft is making it easier than ever to avoid Windows8).
$119 (in Australia, at least) is too much for me to try editing capabilities. How about you keep the price but only prevent me from saving? I need to know how it feels editing the documents before I commit to such price.
Wow. Office for iPad actually looks pretty great. This is great news for Apple and the Windows users out there who didn't want to use iPad for lack of official MS Office products.
Why does Microsoft offer not only the single apps but also one app with all single apps included? That seems to be rather unusual for iOS apps.
As a side note, App Store search is still lacking: Looking for 'microsoft office' did not result in a single hit related to actual apps from Microsoft. Googling for App Store links to the four new apps was easier in the end …
What would be nice if you can read and comment/highlight for free and edit for pay. I suspect one typical use case is to have someone send around a doc to solicit comments and incorporate them subsequent. In fact, this model kind of enforces that flow so you don't have multiple people editing it and forking the original.
To me, there needs to be a step change in information input for the Office Suite to be something I'd use on an iPad. Word processing and speadsheet manipulation are so text intensive. Interested to try it out though.
I was really hoping the "developers" portion would announce a Xamarin acquisition. Maybe at BUILD, but curiously as this talk was going on I got an email from Xamarin telling me to visit them at BUILD.
At some point you have to decide whether the the perfect (everyone using Windows phones/tablets and MS Software) is the enemy of the good (a lot of people using MS Software).
Microsoft has for whatever reason never hit the target with mobile platforms. I guess the Windows Phone is decent enough by some accounts but was just way too late to the party.
So they can try to make money selling mobile software for a mobile platform that nobody uses, or they can just accept reality and sell the software on all platforms.
It's that or gradually become more and more irrelevant to a very large segment of the computing market. I think there more to this than just 'accepting their fate' to never be a successful mobile devices company.
If their mobile software succeeds and becomes as near-essential as Office once was, that could well create a halo effect for their mobile platforms. After all if you use MS software every day on your phone or tablet, why not buy an MS phone or tablet next time you're in the market for one?
Their first order of business in mobile is to become relevant again. Today took their best shot at that in a very long time.
In the console game world, softwares(games) can decide the fate of consoles. Dreamcast failed BEFORE PS2 is released, due to Final Fantasy X, XI and XII. Another example is that Xbox survived because of Halo.
In my opnion, Office is the ace software of Microsoft. It is even the de-facto standard. Therefore Microsoft should keep them exclusive on their platform.
Keeping Office off the iPad until now hasn't prevented millions of customers from buying them, or pushed any significant number of users to Windows 8 (RT) tablets instead. Microsoft's indispensable programs haven't been sorely missed for the last four years.
Super Mario 3D World is 1080p (I took your 'REALLY HD' to mean you didn't realize Mario was already in HD), it's also the best co-op multi-player experience I've ever had:
The issue I find is that spreadsheets are really unpleasant to work with on a tablet (or any touch display). Given that, things like QuickOffice or similar work mostly just fine for viewing.
Question - does the equation editor work in Word? When viewing Word docs on iOS previously I could only see about 70% of my mechanical engineering lab reports without it.
The Microsoft Office Apps don't integrate well with other iOS apps. There's no open-in in other apps and no support for AirPrint or other printing options.
i wonder if it will keep getting regular updates and support too -- what product cycle will it be on? will it have clippy -- the office assistant? so many questions.
This looks very well done. This is exciting. Honestly, I've almost entirely transitioned from Office to Google Docs. I could see this pulling me back in.
They missed the competition for IE completely and were way too late with IE7. They missed the competition from the mobile world and dragged their feet a bit with WP7. They're not going to lose Office too, which is their biggest cash-cow. Without Office, entire corporations will no longer see Microsoft as a "must-have" company.
How is this lame? If you only require viewing docs on the iPad you can do that for free. That's fantastic and most people will probably be satisfied with that. A subscription is only to edit and I believe gives you access to Office 365. For software you use daily a subscription shouldn't be a problem.
It's just the anti-corporate parade of users on HN who aren't used to paying for software. The majority of users here are wholly outside the target market.
There's a huge universe of companies more than willing to pay for these, and it's about time that MS take advantage of re-establishing Office as a cross-device dominant platform for the everyday office worker, rather than losing its edge as an office platform because of silly hardware / software politics internal to their own organization.
>It's just the anti-corporate parade of users on HN who aren't used to paying for software.
Close. We aren't used to keep paying for software with no end in sight. Don't know about you but I subscribe to things I know I will be using regularly. Like daily. Guess were office software falls? Not under the daily usage at home.
Am I supposed to start writing word docs each week and mail them to my family just so I don't feel ripped of cause I am continuously paying for office?
Just wait until the next Windows costs 100 bucks a year. Cause that is where this is headed and apparently people don't seem to have any problem overpaying Microsoft for software.
Subscriptions in general leave a bad taste in my mouth. What happened to just buying the software, and when you felt like upgrading (either because of compatibility issues, or needed functionality) then you can upgrade? Subscriptions definitely are a win for a business by ensuring income streams, but as a consumer I want to pay the company when I feel like buying something and not when they feel like they need money.
In my opinion, subscriptions are a net win for everyone. For the following reasons:
1. They allow easy access to upgrades, and make it far easier to make sure everyone is on the latest and greatest (you aren't paying for every upgrade, so there is little incentive to hold out.)
2. The consumer pays far less up front -- for example, Adobe Creative Suite costs $600+ and that is money you have to pay upfront. Or I can pay $30 a month to use all of the software in that suite. In my example, I would never buy Photoshop as I can't justify $600+ in price for my uses. $30 a month I can justify. Basically, as a consumer I get access to software/functionality that I never would have had access to before.
3. I only pay for as long as I need it. If after a 6 monhts, I no longer have a need for the software, I cancel my subscription. As simple as that. I have not wasted a lot of money.
4. Which leads to making the software publishers work harder to put in features that help a larger base of users, not just corporate users. And to provide theses features on a more regular basis to keep me paying the monthly fee.
Sure, you can look at it the way you are suggesting but overall I think it is a win/win scenario.
How is it a win/win if I lose my data when I quit paying the subscription? Having proprietary data formats means that if I want to keep using what I've created, I'm kept hostage by my subscription.
It's a lot better with things like Office, where other programs have been able to extract the data, but it still seems too much like extortion for my liking.
I think companies have been forced to turn to subscriptions. People aren't willing to pay $150 for office anymore. They probably wouldn't be willing to pay $40 on iPad. Software prices have been forced so low that subscriptions are the only way out.
Finally they've accepted the fact that they need to optimize to apple products, the Gates mentality has been blocking innovation in this area and this might be the breakthrough !
If you listen to recent interviews, he still holds to the view that Microsoft has always been the true innovator with regard to tablets, and that's where serious business computing takes place.
I think that's a little unfair. The technology just wasn't ready yet. The one place they got it really wrong was with the OS but we didn't have WiFi yet (well most people didn't), we didn't have the kind of touch displays we have now, flash storage wasn't cost effective so they probably used HDD's. They had the general idea right but were too early. Unfortunately when the tech was ready MS was too slow.
Good to see that, competition is always good for the users, and Apple, Google and MS all seem to be quite strong on their fields (although Google is the most fashionable nowadays).