Microsoft first started work on its touch-friendly Office apps for Windows 8.1 more than five years ago. Designed for tablets or laptops with touchscreens, the apps are lightweight and speedy versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft has updated them regularly for Windows 10, but now that the company has halted work on Windows 10 Mobile, it’s also halting work on these Office apps.
The apps aren’t fully dead yet, but Microsoft is no longer developing new features for them. “We are currently prioritizing development for the iOS and Android versions of our apps; and on Windows, we are prioritizing Win32 and web versions of our apps,” explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.
Typical Microsoft. They develop this entirely new way of writing and building applications, they want everyone to switch to it, but then fail at the dogfooding stage because the Office team is incapable of moving beyond its slow and bloated existing codebase. They got farther than ever before this time – the UWP Office apps are quite full-featured and much faster and more pleasant to use than their traditional counterparts – but still never even got in sight of the finish line.
Pardon me ? What the shit did I just read ? Weren’t they working hard to depreciate this “embarrassing” legacy ?
Edited 2018-09-29 16:33 UTC
Heh, I bought win32.org and win32.software while everyone else was focusing on the new and shiny things. Since most of the software I write is inexpressible in UWP, it always seemed to me like Win32 wasn’t going to go away.
UWP was a solution trying to find a problem. Since the mobile market was conquered by Apple and Google, the one market that UWP was aimed at has been crushed. The fact is, it was too little too late for microsoft. Once they had developed the products (WP, Win8 etc etc) the market was already lost to the opposition. UWP would have been great on tablets and smartphones, if it had been the success Microsoft was hoping for.
Well, the problem is/was obvious – Win32 is garbage, and doesn’t really scale well off the desktop.
Who cares if it’s garbage? So is pure X11 or framebuffer. Win32 is hardly relevant by itself – it’s well understood (together with bugs and various quirks) and you can use Qt, GTK, .NiET, FLTK and other cross platform frameworks or simply javascript if you want to run your app on anything starting from door handle to high end system. Even computers dug out of the trash can which you can buy for the cost of the coffee+sandwich can handle javascript application easily. I doubt many people want to rewrite their code base from one GUI framework to another and have fun with all the bugs again.
Win32 is just a versatile api, I don’t see where is couldn’t scale off the desktop…
That hardware-down won the race to mobile-up?
If the case, why support two expensive efforts?
After Win81, can’t run -even on compatibility modes- most of my older legacy. Deprecating is Real.
According to Microsoft less than 1% of all software that runs on Win7 doesn’t run on Windows 10, so your “most of my older legacy” and “deprecating is real” sound incredibly unrealistic. You can report such software to Microsoft and they will actually help you make it work.
Could you give some examples of such legacy software?
That’s PR avgalen:
Lotus Approach DB: Big Efforts From Lotus on it ended with Win95. Whas IBM who bought it as trash? Efforts from MS to keep it compatible ended wit WindowsXP. Just made my own installer to avoid them.
Compatibility modes got serious with Win7 which is great and could run my own installer without further ado.
Deprecation got serious with 8 and barely the core executable and libraries ran. Failed at Help Files and had install kirks.
Deprecation is RIGHT. Find it OK to keep a platform lean. Can install an XP image on a hurry, run the only DB I learned on RAM disk.
Actively trying not to need DataBases. Was -to me- such a high inversion.
Thats why Standards will prevail, in the end, Satya.
Compatibility is something Microsoft takes very seriously and surely isn’t PR. You should start here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/act-tec… and try two of the tools that are linked from there: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/sua-use… and for your case https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/compati….
Every company that I have helped migrate from 7 (or earlier) to 10 has been able to keep all their applications working with 1 exception that was related to old FoxPro 16 bit database drivers that no longer worked on 64bit. Every single program that I have ever written myself (started in 1998) also still works on 10.
Your help-files that don’t run are a well-known issue since after XP and hasn’t really changed from 7-8-8.1-10. You either have to convert the .hlp format to .chm or use the XP version of winhlp32.exe
https://www.tenforums.com/general-support/16982-cant-read-older-hlp-…
If the installer doesn’t work you can try running the installer in compatibility mode or just use the extracted program files, maybe in compatibility mode, after registering a few dll’s. This has worked 100% of the times for me and my custormers.
Of course I don’t know exactly which version of Lotus Approach you are using, but it seems to run just fine on Windows 10: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/587328/lotus-approach-and-…
Heartly thanks, avgalen. On looking at the resources you neared, realizing I give up lot more easily than Community around here
Microsoft has tons of good programmers; That’s not where the problems lay. Bureaucracy is a big source of their problems. Even when a team or division gets it spot-on right, someone higher up the ladder screws it up. Microsoft has the advantage of some truly great people working for them. Unfortunately a lot of them are being mismanaged, misplaced, or simply under-utilized.
Agreed. Clusterfucks are almost always the result of poor leadership, not anything done by the proles. Blame for this lies with management (or lack thereof).
Or, rather than looking for someone to blame, accept it for what it is. What seemed like a good plan didn’t work in practice.
This happens all the time, and fair play that they have recognised that and killed it. Their attempt to get this into the mainstream never worked, you need only look at the Windows Store to see that. On that note, I assume that will be dying off soon too without UWP.
You assume wrong, and I have no idea why you think UWP is going to disappear
Without the architect of UWP (Microsoft) eating its own dogfood, no one else will.
We saw the same with Silverlight and XNA. The those two and UWP were touted as the mechanisms of delivering one app to multiple platforms, that concept is now dead. So why bother rewriting an app as UWP anymore? Windows Store availability? Direct distribution is still very much more profitable.
Hmmm, maybe it has something to do with the very company that invented it pulling their own apps away from it? You think?
Mouse and keyboard are better for content creation in documents and spreadsheets.
For platforms with no option – like phones, you need a simple touch interface.
But on a device like a laptop that had both touch and mouse and keyboard, I would suggest that the touch features are largely useless – keyboard is better for typing and the finger is typically too imprecise for spreadsheets.
So MS are dropping the touch interface for computers, keeping it for mobile, and improving mouse and keyboard for computers.
As a user, that makes total sense to me.
Actually, I rather like doing spreadsheets with a touch screen… but not on Windows, which still has touch support that feels half-baked at best. Excel on the iPad Pro is, however, a joy to use and I hope they don’t intend to kill that in their effort to focus on the crappy web version.
Curious – is that with a pen as input or a finger?
Touch screen features *ARE* useless on a computer and results in a interface who’s design is a total mess. Just look at Gnome 3 and it’s ilk for instace
In the ‘lowest common denominator cross platform solution’ – the web has won – heck – UWP wasn’t even universal – with the death of Windows mobile the list of platforms is Windows, Xbox and Hololense. Only Windows matters for office.
Office that works everywhere is the web version.
The office that works best for your particular platform – is the one written for that platform specifically.
There is no space for UWP – unless you saw it as yet another attempt for a complete replacement for Windows only development.
sort of says it all really.
As they won’t eat their own dogfood then why should we eh?
I fully expect another attempt on the mobile market before the end of the decade. It will fail but somehow 1% of the market is regarded as a success.
Only among desktop Linux users.
Seriously, I doubt it’ll be before the end of this decade that Microsoft try again. Next decade is fair game though. They were incredibly short-sighted in how they approached it: going after the consumer market that was already taken, providing zero upgrade path for users and developers alike, changing their platform at least three times. If they’d capitalized on their strength–the enterprise–they would have been the new version of Blackberry and would have had market penetration everywhere! I have no idea what their next attempt will look like, but they’d better think it through and have something amazing that no one else has before they even bother to put it out there.