[Mythbusters]

Anybody who shares their opinion should consider these points:

1. The office on surface is not the final version of software. It has RTM'ed so it should get updated with the final version pretty soon.

2. The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware and ARM architecture is in itself a feat of engineering and Microsoft should get some credit for that here. I was dying to put this louis CK piece in the comments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk

[smegel]

> The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware

This is an extremely misleading statement. "Tablet class hardware" today is vastly more powerful than PC's several years ago which were quite happily running the Office of their day.

Furthermore, there is plenty of Office-like equivalents happily running on Android and iOS tablets today so the suggestion that "Office on a tablet" is some kind of revolution seems to lack substance.

[Mythbusters]

I was referring to ARM as the architecture. Should have been clearer

[smegel]

Sorry, but I still dont understand your point. Dual/Quad-core ARM chips of today running at 1.5Ghz blow away x86 based PC's from several years ago (I don't know exactly at what point) that ran Office XP quite happily.

To give you an idea, the system requirements of Office XP was "a Pentium processor with a clock speed of at least 133 megahertz (MHz)".

Besides, tablets are doing amazing things today, are we really saying an Office suite represents the pinnacle of computing power?

[Mythbusters]

In case you are not trolling, time to educate yourself with the difference between these two architectures: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/107133....

Surprise, if you copy an old mac app on your iPhone it won't run!

[smegel]

No, please, why don't you educate us all as to the deficiencies in ARM over x86 that make porting an x86 application to ARM some incredible achievement?

[MBCook]

You seem to believe that ARM performs quite poorly compared to x86 (assuming similar clock speeds). Could you explain why?

It seems like if something could run on a ~166 MHz Pentium, it shouldn't be a surprise that a Tegra 3 (probably 1.5 Ghz or more) can run something similar. And older versions of Office ran on much less.

Even then, Apple put Pages on the iPad 3 years ago, so that should prove word processor like software could run acceptably on an ARM. The Surface is clearly much more powerful than an iPad 1.

[Mythbusters]

and the updated office runs on it beautifully. So what is your point again?

[gman99]

He was just responding to your comment:

> The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware

Well, current ARM platforms vastly outstrip the performance requirements of, say, OfficeXP so "tablet class hardware" means nothing.

So the question is why do you find it impressive that MS got Office working on SurfacePro? In fact, it would be surprising if they couldn't. Sure, if they were emulating x86 code on ARM then it would truly be impressive for it to perform as well as it does. But this should be a straightforward port.

In fact, here's Win95 running on an N900 (5 year old ARM hardware emulating an x86) http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42195

[stephencanon]

"A program like office" (office itself) ran on less capable hardware than the tablet in question for 15 years or so. I'm not really seeing the achievement here.

[Mythbusters]

Right and those office like apps are toys. Not a real productivity application. There were touch screen phones before iPhone and search engines before Google. I am not saying Office running on ARM is in the same league but there is no denying the first class engineering there.

[stephencanon]

Office XP was a "toy"? Office 2003? The SoC in the Surface is as capable (and in many ways more capable) than the commodity computers of that era.

At what point exactly do you believe office stopped being a toy?

[Mythbusters]

Aren't we talking about the architecture here? Surface and the software on it is ARM architecture. Something that Office never ran on before. These are significantly different architectures and just because the graphics or processing capabilities are same does not mean it will run right?

Besides the version that was tested with was a beta. The final version of office runs smoothly on the device. So what is your point? RTFA!

[stephencanon]

Correct. The architecture is different, and software written for x86 will not "just run" on ARM.

However, porting a userland application to a new architecture of roughly equal capability is not a major engineering accomplishment. There is significant work to be done in the compiler, in the OS kernel and libraries, and I don't mean to detract from that at all. Well-written application code (especially code for productivity apps that generally doesn't make heavy use of processor-specific features like vector ISAs) should require minimal change.

My point is simply that office should not tax the capabilities of the SoC at all, and that getting it to run isn't a major feat of engineering in itself; no limits are being pushed here. I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't done a good job, or that Office sucks on the Surface. I'm just trying to have some perspective.

[objclxt]

I'm prepared to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, and suggest that Office is a bit more complex than your average user-land application. I suspect a lot of the code is either quite old or low-level, to a much larger degree than a typical app. It's not just Microsoft - think about how long it took Apple to migrate iTunes from Carbon to Cocoa, or Adobe to get 64 bit PhotoShop on the Mac.

[MBCook]

The number one reason I see to pick Surface over an iPad is that it has Office. Many other reviews and commentaries seem to agree, and Microsoft has certainly made no secret of Office.

The idea of shipping a new platform, where Office is included and a core feature, with an unfinished copy of Office is crazy to me.

Bugs will be found, and I would fully expect that patches would come out in short order to address those issues. Bit allowing the device to ship with something labeled "preview" (Microsoft for beta) is a very odd decision.

I agree with other commenters that running office on ARM isn't an amazing feat. I ran Office 95 on a ~33Mhz 386DX. Office has have advanced since then, but still.

It seems quite probable the original article's author ran into some odd bug since I haven't seen that type-ahead compliant elsewhere. But the fact that bits of the out of the box experience seem to suffer so much on day one tells you a lot about where Surface was in its development cycle.

Why is Office (and some system settings) the only things that need/use the desktop in RT? Since 3rd party apps can't use it why not jut eliminate it? It's so odd that the flagship software doesn't it in with the Metro environment, often using classic controls like the touch unfriendly save dialog.

Surface needed to be Microsoft putting their best foot forward. It sounds more like it was rushed to meet some kind of ship target when it could have used at least a bit more polish.

[objclxt]

"The idea of shipping a new platform, where Office is included and a core feature, with an unfinished copy of Office is crazy to me."

I've got a Surface box in front of me, and it definitely says "Includes Office Home and Student 2013 RT PREVIEW", with a footnote saying a final version of Office will be available to download in the future for free.

This was also pointed out to me in person by the assistant at the Microsoft Store when I bought it. On the one hand it would be quite nice to have a finished version of Office, but I certainly didn't feel misled when I bought it. Not that I disagree with you that Microsoft should have released a final version, but I guess the priority was to get something out ASAP.

To pose what will surely be a controversial question here: if Apple can get away with selling Siri as a core feature whilst it's in beta, why can't Microsoft do the same with Office?

[MBCook]

It's nice to hear that MS is making the preview aspect clear to purchasers so no one is misled. That was a great thing to do.

I heard the Siri comparison brought up on a podcast I listen to (something on 5by5, don't remember which show). The theory they mentioned was that while Siri was certainly the feature they really marketed for that revision, it wasn't the core feature.

So a more apt comparison may be if the iPhone shipped with a buggy phone app that got updated day one, but that's not quite an apples to apples comparison. And Siri was a big reason people bought the 4S, just like Offixe is a big reason to buy Surface.

With Google, that's just their MO. They release early and often, that's just part of their experience. Apple (to my memory) hasn't done that historically, but seems to be going it more lately. Siri is the obvious example. OS X 10.0 could be considered a beta, but it didn't even boot by default on the computers it was pre-installed on. The new maps and Final Cut Pro x could be argued to be beta too.

I guess it's becoming more common, which is kinda sad.

[yuhong]

"It has RTM'ed so it should get updated with the final version pretty soon."

This update is already available and will be pushed out automatically in November.

[microtherion]

It's a feat of engineering to get Office running, agreed. That it takes a feat of engineering to get a word processor running on a platform with a 1GHz+ processor, half a gig (or more) of RAM, and gigabytes of mass storage, however, is somewhat depressing.

What was even more depressing was to see the resulting product. Apart from the speed issues, which seem to be resolved, should we really be cheered to see this bloated abomination run on yet another platform, to crank out more documents only readable by installing the same bloated abomination on your own machine?

The image that came to my mind on seeing word running in all its desktoppy glory was "a boot stomping on a human face, forever".