[sz4kerto]

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).

[mortenjorck]

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.

[kyllo]

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.

[rodgerd]

<i>This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform.</i>

It's always easy to see who's in the bubble.

[octo_t]

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.

My mum hasn't touched her PC in several months.

[zanny]

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

[WalterBright]

I can't use an ipad for real work. I can't program on anything smaller than a BFM and I need a real keyboard to do more than a few characters.

[batoure]

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.

[Tloewald]

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?

[dasil003]

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.

[batoure]

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)

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute...

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

[migrantgeek]

I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned.

Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.

Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)

[batoure]

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.

[yskchu]

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.

[batoure]

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)

[gress]

That's because market share is a meaningless measure.

[batoure]

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.

[Tenhundfeld]

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.

[rodgerd]

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.

[ksk]

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.

[jamesbritt]

Hasn't Office always been available for the Mac?

[kyllo]

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.

[jbrooksuk]

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.

[ghshephard]

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.

[threeseed]

For 95% of their user base Outlook for Mac is also at feature parity.

I've been using it in enterprise for years and never found a missing feature.

[seanmcdirmid]

Mac Office has often surpassed Win Office in many ways; in usability for example. It is at least a different product, not better or worse.

[rahimnathwani]

"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.

[selectodude]

OneNote for Mac just came out, and it's really good. So they're obviously doing something in the MacBU.

[jusben1369]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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."

[BugBrother]

>> 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.

I googled this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...

[jusben1369]

"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."

[stingraycharles]

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.

[r00fus]

Yes, in fact, before Windows even existed, the 1.0 version of Word for Mac was released the same year the Mac debuted (1984).

[Touche]

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.

[kyllo]

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.

[tanzam75]

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.

[WalterBright]

Microsoft made products for the Apple decades ago.

[skrowl]

You know that the RT versions of Microsoft Surface (and other RT tables) come with Office and have since they launched, right?

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-2...

[Maarten88]

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?

[dep_b]

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.

[yulaow]

He stressed "tablet optimized version"

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.

[jwcooper]

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.

[aroch]

Yes, and the RT version is a pile of poop and neither version performs particularly well in a touch-only environment

[martinald]

I agree.

The most exciting thing would be Mono becoming a first-class citizen for .NET.

I think this is likely for two reasons:

1) They may well acquire Xamarin, which would result in them 'owning' Mono.

2) The new CEO has been extremely forward thinking vs the rest of Microsoft on supporting open source software on Azure.

3) Increasing amounts of ASP.NET and other .NET technologies are open source now

I would love for them to do this. I think they'd also do very well out of it, as Azure is great platform.

[gum_ina_package]

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.

[skrowl]

It's not so much that I love C# as I hate Objective C (iOS) and Java (Android)

[wtetzner]

To be fair, there are many language choices that compile to Java bytecode. They can be used for Android development.

[kyllo]

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.

[Pxtl]

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.

[kyllo]

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...

[jodrellblank]

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

Why do you think that would be the case?

When I think "open-source" I think "fragmented, lots of utterly terrible things, lots of half-finished false-starts".

[kyllo]

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.

[yulaow]

I was really happy seeing that azure sdks are released not only natively for windows but also for osx and linux.

Imho, their strategy for asp.net can be easily what you described here.

[pionar]

asp.net is open source, and it should run on any CLR.

[tkubacki]

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.

[jasallen]

> "I've got working asp.net ecommerce solutions"

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.

[tkubacki]

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)

[nakor]

"App store for Android," What does this mean? Looks interesting.

[sliverstorm]

He's talking about one of these two things:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Microsoft+Co...

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/12/5404098/microsoft-consider...

[Geee]

Or, that Nokia has Android app store.

[guelo]

Unless you're Apple in which case everything is locked down to your platforms.

[chrisdevereux]

http://www.apple.com/iwork-for-icloud/

[vvhn]

well, you still need an Apple device to sign up for an iCloud account :)

[foldor]

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

[malandrew]

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.

[abuqutaita]

Yep, we're listening, and it's actively being worked on. See this: http://msopentech.com/blog/2014/02/25/vagrant-and-hyper-v-pr..., and there's more like it still to come.

[malandrew]

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.

[voltagex_]

Hyper V is Microsoft's answer to VMWare's ESX, not to VirtualBox.

VirtualBox can be godawful at times. What's not working for you?

[malandrew]

vagrant-windows is not working at all on OS X at the moment. https://github.com/WinRb/vagrant-windows/issues/177

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.

[adventured]

I know it's not a huge deal, but I was always impressed they offered Linux for Azure.

[r00fus]

I think Microsoft has realized that Linux isn't the danger they feared.

[andyzweb]

embrace, extend, extinguish

[NicoJuicy]

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, ...)

[ekianjo]

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).

[ksk]

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.

[slowmotiony]

How is that expected?

[megablast]

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....)

[jpatel3]

Its better than closing the options by limiting stuff to yourself when you seeing that users are not where you think they are.

[shmerl]

You mean started with Ballmer gone?

[amaks]

It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.

[ihuman]

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.

[smacktoward]

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.

[pionar]

I believe that's what they're doing, with the "free to view, pay to edit" model.

[niels_olson]

maybe it should be free to edit, pay to share?

[chrisBob]

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.

[webjprgm]

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.

[ams6110]

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.

[Silhouette]

Microsoft is after the business users who will throw the subscription on expenses without a second thought.

Maybe a few years ago. I'm not sure how many CIOs are still drinking that Kool-Aid today, though.

[Xdes]

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.

[slantyyz]

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.

[chj]

The problem is there are people who don't use as much as $7/mo. Of course, if your company covers it, it is not a big deal.

[booruguru]

> 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.

[kayoone]

same for Apple or anybody basically, just different cash cows.