Earlier today, we announced an expanded global partnership with Samsung to deliver Microsoft mobile productivity services to both consumer and business customers. Building on that news, I’m pleased to share that we’ve also expanded strategic agreements with leading global OEM Dell, and regional OEMs including TrekStor of Germany, JP Sa Couto of Portugal, Datamatic of Italy, DEXP of Russia, Hipstreet of Canada, QMobile of Pakistan, Tecno of Africa, and Casper of Turkey, as well as top original device manufacturer Pegatron. These 11 hardware partners will pre-install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype on Android devices coming to market later this year.
Now this I can get behind, sort of – assuming the applications are removable. Microsoft’s Office suite for Android is pretty good, and especially for someone like me who uses Office a lot, this is pretty great.
I’d be surprised if anyone who was in favor of banning ISP ‘fast lanes’ were in favor of this. I mean, just like fast lanes, doesn’t this put other/smaller competitors at an unfair advantage?
Internet fast lanes are inherently consumer hostile – free copies of Office are not.
How so? For example, if you’re guaranteed 4k video on a particular service, why does it matter as long as everything else goes at the speed you paid for? I don’t think having certain things go FASTER than what you’re paying for is harmful for the consumer, as long as they’re not slowing down anything else. And the no blocking/throttling provision should ensure that …
Fast lanes do one (or more) of three things:
1) Forces consumers to pay more to their ISP to avoid degraded service for certain uses of the Internet. I already pay for a 20Mbit connection, which is enough for a 4k stream from Netflix. Having to pay extra to make sure they deliver at the speed I’m paying more is consumer hostile.
2) Forces content providers to pay to have their content delivered at higher speed. Why should Netflix be required to pay extra to send me data at the connection speed I am already paying for? Increasing their costs raises my price for Netflix.
3) I use data in a manner not easily classifiable by any prioritization scheme – why should my data take a backseat to other data services – video, for example? Why isn’t my data as important?
Either way, no matter which end is paying for it, the need for paid prioritization means that the ISP has oversold it’s capacity, and rather than just saying “We’ve over sold”, rather than increasing capacity to handle all their customers, they’re asking them to pay extra to guarantee that THEY aren’t the ones affected by over-commitment of their infrastructure.
If you sell me a 20Mbit connection, I should get 20Mbit to everything capable of sending me 20Mbit. If you sell me a 100Mbit connection, I should get a 100Mbit connection on every service able to send me data that quickly.
Which is a complete mischaracterization. People were against ISP SLOW lanes.
Either you have a remarkably low opinion of Microsoft software, or you meant “unfair DISadvantage”.
MS hates Android/Linux, they won’t make their crapware removable.
So Microsoft is giving people a good reason to Root your phone… to remove bloatware that they help create!
It’s not really up to Microsoft. Applications that go into /system/app cannot be removed without a custom recovery or root access.
Android phone manufacturers cannot ship apps in /data/app otherwise they won’t survive factory resets.
Edited 2015-03-24 09:28 UTC
Doubtful that this will be removable, at least on Dell tablets.
Just purchased 2x of the new 8″ Dell Android tablet (the one with the ridiculously thin bezel) and there are several apps on it that can’t be removed by the user…Evernote, for example.
Fortunately, it ships from the factory with an unlocked bootloader, so a format/reinstall should be in order shortly.
I’ve not used Dell’s flavour of Android, but do they prevent you from stripping updates & disabling the apps through the app manager?
Perhaps, Microsoft new strategy would be something like this:
1) Create good applications for Android and iOS (they can not ignore the current situation);
2) Entice people to use them (and they would make some money);
3) Make some special features/integration with desktop/servers available only on Winphones;
4) Convince people the switch is worth.
Chance of success ?
It’s not even that complex.
Remember MS has decided they want to become a services company.
They just want people to buy Office 365 and OneDrive subscriptions.
And MS Office for Android is pretty much locked to 365/Onedrive.
Just because you like MS Office and need it for yourself you are saying software bundling like this is ok.
For me it is the same as all the other crapware that OEMs ship with their products. This includes Windows, which is very hard to avoid when buying a laptop. The user pays for it, either as an ad target, or with his own money (when I buy a Thinkpad without OS, it is a €89 prize drop — but I am lucky to have the option in the first place).
I am all for options and “deals”, but forced bundling is almost never in the interest of the user.
Edited 2015-03-24 09:54 UTC
Well, when they launch Office, it will have a splashscreen saying “Well, at least it isn’t a U2 album”.
Will it support ODF, or as on OS X it will be a crippled release?
The current release of Word for Android appears to import .odt files but converts them to .docx via a so-called “secure web service”. To edit, you have to resave as .docx, and there’s no .odt export I can see.
(There may or may not be such an export via Office 365; I don’t have a subscription so can’t test.)
Haven’t checked the other Office apps but I’d expect similar support at best.