Microsoft’s set of Office Mobile apps are great. I prefer them over the full Office suite. I realize that a lot of people find the Office Mobile apps to be subpar. But there are people out there for whom the Office Mobile apps are more than fine. Why isn’t Microsoft doing anything with them?
I posed this same question not too long ago. The Metro Office applications are the best Metro applications out there, and they prove it’s definitely possible to build good, useable, fast, and useful Metro applications. I find it entirely baffling that Microsoft is doing whatever it takes to push users to the slower, more cumbersome, overloaded, and entirely overkill Win32 Office applications. If Microsoft implemented the ability to open multiple instances of each app, most people would get by just fine with the Metro ones.
I started using them as well on phones and tablets. In tablets they’re especially amazing, so much so that I forget I’m using the mobile version, except when I need some split screen copy and pasting that takes a bit longer due to being a bit more complicated.
The Office team have been killing it on the UI and application performance for a while now.
For most people, the prime feature of MS Office is compatibility with MS Office: they need to open files created by other people and need to create files which will be opened by other people. The rest, UI, full set of features and so are secondary.
In this regard the competition has improved, but still is not at the same level of compatibility. And probably will never be.
As for the article idea of bundling the lite office versions with Windows 10, then who would continue to buy MS Office? I remember when I was still using Windows, there was Write/Wordpad: almost nobody used it because the lack of compatibility with Word. And I remember how Microsoft tried to push Works with no success.
Works was surprisingly good. Maybe not quite “i’m gonna pay for it” good, but files made in Works could open in Office, making it a good “cheap” alternative for cash-strapped students.
I’d still choose staroffice/openoffice/libreoffice over Works though.
Yeah, was thinking of works too.
At least the early versions, they were not compatible with office. Very frustrating, trying to convert documents saved in the works format in something anything else. I think I had to save as rtf in order to get them out of works formats.
Yeah, wiki seems to agree with my memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works#File_format_compatibil…
Anyways, I think a lite version of office would make a lot of sense for Microsoft. But with Google office essentially free, no real need of customers for office lite.
Microsoft is evolving from an OS centric to a productivity centric brand value promise. However there are still vestiges of the old ethos, like favouring ever increasing complexity apps that need new PCs that need new Windows licences. It will change IMO.
90s called, they want their comment back…
(seriously, the issue of hardware requirements of Windows or Office mandating a new computer is long gone)
Not always the case. Windows 8 requires a processor equipped NX, PAE and SSE2 technologies. This excludes my ancient (2002) but stil capable Northwood Celeron system. More recent examples are devices with Intel’s Atom Clover Trail chips not getting Windows 10 Creators Update.
Allright, typically the case…
(plus hardware features are slightly separate thing; and 2002 is ancient 
…might also have something to do with Intel’s segmentation)