“A letdown. That’s the only way to describe Microsoft’s Office 2013 announcement,” Randall C. Kennedy writes for BetaNews. “ith the fate of the Windows ecosystem hanging in the balance, the Redmond, Wash.-based giant is doing what it always does when faced with a tough, course-changing decision: It’s playing internal politics.”
“On one side you have the Windows division. Right now, they’re facing an existential crisis, with Apple and Google poised to dominate the emerging post-PC landscape,” Kennedy writes. “On the other side you have the Office team. Long the sacred cash cow of Microsoft’s revenue model, these folks operate with a level of impunity unequaled within the walls of Fort Redmond. Their loyalty is first and foremost to their own divisional bottom line, and they traditionally have resisted efforts by the Windows team to get them onboard as early adopters for new OS and platform technologies.”
“So it should come as no surprise that the Office folks are sitting out the whole Windows RT mess,” Kennedy writes. “They’re all still traditional Windows applications, and that means limited integration with the rest of the Metro UI model… And they’re all still chock-full of layered dialog boxes and other tightly packed controls that are difficult bordering on impossible to navigate by touch. Basically, Office 2013 is a half-baked, inconsistent mess.”
Kennedy writes, “The Office division remains the rock on which much of Microsoft’s success was built. Too bad their unwillingness to embrace the pending sea change will likely spell the death of the software giant.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote yesterday, immediately following Microsoft’s big reveal of Office 2013:
With this “new” Office, users are stuck with the usual desktop-based UI festooned with myriad taskbars, menus, and toolbars; Same old shit sandwich, stiffed to the gills, slathered under Metro icing. Launch Word on a Surface tablet, if they ever do actually appear for sale, and you’re chucked right straight back into the old Windows UI.
Back and forth, with no rhyme or reason, the sufferers are forced to bounce between the old Windows UI and the Metro tile-fest that’s meant to mask the platforms’ terminal case of AppLack™.
Schizo much, Microsoft? As always, Microsoft is unwilling, unable, and downright scared shitless to let go of the Windows PC cash cow’s teats. It will be their undoing, yet. That cow’s cash is drying up quickly.
Microsoft’s new Office on their vaporous Surface tablet will virtually require a physical keyboard (or endure the frustration of being forced to try to work in a tiny strip of hardly usable space with the soft keyboard overlaying most of your document). So, then, why not just get a notebook computer ? If you’re unfortunate enough to have to run Office, you might as well be smart about it and get a MacBook Air to run it either natively (Office for Mac) or via fast virtualization (Parallels, VMWare Fusion, etc.).
The rest of us will continue to enjoy Apple’s iWork not only on our Macs, but also on our iPads where it’s designed for Multi-Touch™ from the ground up. With iWork for iPad, Apple has put the deep level of care and thought into the product that Microsoft, throughout their history, have constantly and without fail proven themselves to be incapable of replicating.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Elsic1975a” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Microsoft CEO Ballmer unveils Office 2013 public beta – July 16, 2012
Office is a bloated carcass. No one without brain damage will upgrade to this version. It’s DOA.
There are very many out there that are so damaged, from using Windows, Word, and Entourage all these years. Hollow eyes, jittery hands, mumbling and darting glances, sallow skin, shuffling gait—I see them all around me.
Wait—it’s just the zombie movie I’m watching…
Windows users ARE zombies. They do constantly suffer ad infinitum not knowing why and not knowing that it can be different. Worse, many of them do not even consider to end their sufferance assuming that’s the way to do it and everything else means “toy”, “not-business”. I have seen it in switchers. Some of them still try to bend and twist their mind forward and backward doing simple tasks the “windows-way”. Horrible indeed. Showing them the elegance of OSX and their head explodes.
Hey wait a cotton pickin minute. I am a hard core Windows and office user and I am not a Zombie. I love the Windows interface and think it is the greatest thing since sliced brains.
@Buster I was beginning to think you’d lost it, all the way up to the last word. Slow clap!
The Zombies remain attached to Windows, despite all reason.
The comments after this article are not too extreme, but the willful blindness remains.
See:
“…As “endpoints” macs are ok, and Google/android products the same. But they are useless for collaboration. They are elevated toys at best.”
Apropos to nothing, Entourage was a Mac-only product.
No no no, everything is just fine with Microsoft’s office politics. They’re doing a bang-up job there, and the board of directors and stockholders should not listen to any of this hateful negativity. They need to keep their flagship products, as well their wonderful CEO. All the way to the end.
MDN: politics is singular, not plural, so politics is killing, not are.
You know that, I know that, MDN knows that I’m sure, but damn if my brain will let me type it.
+1 I’m still having problems getting my 70-y-o head around the fact that “data” and “media” are now considered singular nouns, where we were taught ages ago that their singular forms were “datum” and “medium.”
[sigh] Language evolves.
What about that British monstrosity where a company is pluralized (…Apple are releasing the new iPhone today…) whereas we see it as a collective noun, a singular (…Apple is releasing the new iPhone today…)
Could never stomach that silly rule-driven garishness. Somewhere in the back of my mind I suspect they do it just to show they still own the language and are not American. No proof of that, but that’s what I suspect.
I will struggle, and struggle, and finally get around it by saying something like Political Affairs Are Killing Microsoft.
And at the same time.. if you look it up, some folks say singular, some folks say plural, depending.
politics plural of pol·i·tics (Noun)
Noun: The activities associated with the governance of a country or area. The activities of governments concerning the political relations between countries.
My Mac Dictionary says:
politics |ˈpäləˌtiks| plural noun
the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, esp. the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power:
So I’m gonna go with MDN usage. You might wanna run this by the right nut.
I have to agree with TM, Politics, singular or plural is spelled the same. So, (IMHO) “politics are” would indicate a “proper” plural use.
I’d suggest it depends on what “politics” means:
1. If it means “political activities” then it would be “are”, as in being equivalent to, “All the political activities are killing me”.
2. If it means “the FIELD” of political activity, then singular, as in, “Politics is not a field I’d like to make my living in.”
Spot on!
Thankfully, someone on this site understands *contextual* grammar.
If I had pie, I would gladly share a piece with you.
(btw, do you have any pie?)
How can there be grammar without context?
They need to offer a seperate product for surface and iPad.
Start with one note and build a great viewer and editor for existing office docs. If they try to make the desktop version a hybrid they’ll screw it up and alienate their core users.
Office is too complex and big for the tablet in its current incarnation. Start out simple with a new build for tablets and go from there.
I have no desire for full blown versions of excel, word etc on an ipad or any other “tablet” but I could use a great viewing app that is capable of doing editing (even if the editing is limited)
MIcrosoft already has the code 99% of people need. It was Word v5.0. After that it was major feature-creep.
Word I haven’t kept up with as much as Excel, maybe because I don’t develop large documents all that often so I can’t say really what has gotten better over time with Word. V5 may well cover 99% of what everyone needs.
Excel has changed a lot over the years and there is a reason why it basically took over the data analysis market. Using Excel 2010 with Power Pivots is awesome. I can’t go back to anything before that version.
I haven’t seen what they’ve added to the latest Excel 2013 beta release but if they keep up the pace like they did with 2010 I’ll likely go to 2013 just for excel.
@Really, I wish you could’ve met my boss 20 years ago, who developed project management spreadsheets that were much to large for such things as HD floppies of the day.
And a serious question: What would people like you and my boss use before Excel? To me, whose SS experience is quite limited, it appears that Excel touches so many aspects of everyone’s day-to-day life in one form or another. I’m glad there are folks like you around who can use its power.
Before excel I was using various database products, primarily Paradox and FoxPro on one project.
Reporting was a joke but we got by lol. I’d dump data from a database and work chunks of it in Quattro Pro. We also had this funky inhouse DOS app that took comma delimited files and produced these ugly charts.
Once Excel was able to connect to various databases and they integrated pivot tables and pivot charts I was sold. Its gotten better with each release.
Its easy and quick to connect to a database, dump a massive amount of data and then quickly plot/chart/report it into a format that makes sense and gives me answers. If the data changes I just open the spreadsheet and refresh the data link and its current.
With the 64-bit version you can have over 1 million rows of data on a single worksheet. Using power pivots you can rip through that data in a matter of seconds.
I’ve never seen another spreadsheet with the power of excel. Nothing is even close.
Your old boss sounds like a real data animal lol. I didn’t know anyone that crazy back in that day but I do know a few guys now that make some overly complex spreadsheets and I swear they do it just because they can, not because they need it. lol
Nice story! AFAIK there is really no other real spreadsheet than Excel. I know that for our purposes at home, Numbers is quite satisfactory, but I’m sure you could write a book about its limitations.
Yes, my boss was indeed a data animal. He was at director level (managed managers) but when he was scheduled to lead an executive committee meeting, you could hear the groans as people were overwhelmed with data and charts and rudimentary PPT slides. He could use data to make you believe that black was white. Not statistics, but raw data being pushed around by data bulldozers.
People used to say, “Pay no attention to that little man behind the spreadsheet.” (He was 5’6 and skinny as a rail, pure Italian when talking with his hands…) But it was a real pleasure to work for him as he could use his data to show how much more productive we project managers and engineers would be if we flew to Europe in business class, or how better customer relations would be if our wives were there to schmooze the customers’ wives. He had a true following but you had to give him 110% or else you were out. Sort of like Jobs. Hey, wait…
“Kennedy writes, “The Office division remains the rock on which much of Microsoft’s success was built. Thankfully their unwillingness to embrace the pending sea change will likely spell the death of the software giant.”
Fixed.
I really enjoy the macdailynews comments on given articles, they are quite humorous and on point. I do have one request, can you eliminate the profanity? I’m sure you can find some colorful words to make your point without profanity.
Thanks…
fuck yeah
must have missed it, a little slow today
With 2″ of ribbon at the top and 3″ of keyboard at the bottom plus rulers. There isn’t much working space left for the document.
Apple = a mobile device company. M’soft = a computer company but still fighting the bloat. Question – will Windows 8 finally begin to work from a platform that solves all the confusion here-to-fore the biggest reason to love the Mac and its OS? Apple has ceded the pro market to idiot Ballmer and that’s too bad.
M$ is not a computer company, they are strictly software. Show me a computer they built.
PS: Apple makes a heck of a lot of computers.
I moved to Server 2k8 at work when Vista came-out, so I thought maybe Server 2012 will have a start menu. I created a new VM for the Server 2012 RC, and, no, same metro stuff for Win Server. Just like Win8, it slows to a crawl after about 10min of operation. You’ll probably need 6GB of memory to have a smooth experience. Server Manager crashes too often to be usable, for instance every time you go to the settings menu option. I have to admit, I like the look of Metro, but it’s so devoid of features and usability, I’ve come to dread seeing it. It makes Windows even harder to use, which is kind of a feat in itself.
I won’t need to tell people to get a Mac; Win8/Server 2012 unsells itself.
Launch Word on a Surface tablet, if they ever do actually appear for sale, and you’re chucked right straight back into the old Windows UI.
This isn’t true, that only happens on Windows 7 x86 Surface tablets.
On Windows RT Surface tablets there is no old Windows, there is only Metro.
WinRT (i.e. ARM tablet devices) cannot run this version of Office revealed yesterday.
What Microsoft failed to show yesterday was Office Metro edition. It’s been MIA for quite some time.
Apple does not have Divisions. Apple is one company. ;-P
Ballmer can take a minor office disagreement and quickly escalate it into a full blown departmental siege with bouts of sporadic ethnic cleansing.
That’s what he’s really good at.
Yeah, it really resembles the feudal wars of the middle ages. Bring on the trebuchet and shower them with fire!
The concept of the ribbon was a decent if unadventuous in reality compared to the hype. Only what was relavent at any given time was shown except that much of what you need and given priority in dtp programes was still tucked away mysteriously in an obscure catcall hidden menu. Only ms could execute an idea do obscurely how office stil dominates is a mystery to me. Anyway the ribbon has gone and a new half baked concept replaces it. How much more do we have to suffer.
According to Ballmer, the suffering is only beginning, as Windows Everywhere means not only on your desktop and your Ford car, but soon embedded in every appliance like your refrigerator and oven, spa, house wiring and bidet.
Be very afraid.
Windows is dead. It s RIM 3 years ago. It does not ubiquitous anymore. It is not a defacto platform anymore. It is holding on to their desktop monopoly as it becomea irrelevant. Office is not going to save Windows. Windows has to save Windows and o do not see that happening. They should be less worried about Apple and more of Google. Google is setting themselves up as the heirs to MS and are doing a great job at that.
MSO long term future is what?
Ultimately Apple putting out individual components for low $s per app (or even bundled free) along with OpenOffice tells the future.
The reader should beware, this is the same Randall C. Kennedy who was fired from InfoWorld two years ago.
Not sure what BetaNews thinks it’s doing, hiring this guy to write for them – I suppose they simply enjoy the extra clicks they get (from this site and elsewhere) linking to his inflammatory writings.
Keep up the good work, fellas.
I don’t understand what is so diss appointing about this. I think Microsoft took a leap into the future. A let down would be no news at all.
Office 2013 does look like a mess, but at least there’s an update coming out for it. iWork hasn’t received an update on the mac since 2008. I like iWork, but the UI does need refining in places.
Everyone agrees that Office hasn’t improved in any substantial way in the last decade. But realize that both MS and Apple are pushing cloud shit (rain?) down people’s throats. It is not desireable in any way to us, and likely a significant percentage of computer users. And while it’s always gratifying to some people to see MS stumble, where’s iWork 20xx? When’s the last time a client asked you to send him a “Numbers spreadsheet file”? Does Apple really have a compelling alternative? No, not if you are a power user. So MS continues to flounder, and that means Office for the Mac will also underwhelm. Not a good trend if you care about the health of the Mac ecosystem.
Apple’s software team needs to get its collective ass in gear. More powerful productivity application functions, less bloat. Ensure iOS touch applications work correctly, and make sure the separate Mac desktop applications work correctly, and don’t mix up the two … like Apple unfortunately seems to be attempting to do with Mac OS 10.8.
Microshaft spews a Gooey Metro out their back Oriffice from a Window’s height into a SkyDive.
🙂
Too bad their unwillingness to embrace the pending sea change will likely spell the death of the software giant.
Too bad for whom? Microsoft have consistently refused to mature into a useful contributor to the computer community. Instead they have remained a bumbling parasite. If I saw an iota of hope for their reformation, I’d be loathe to ring their death knell. But I don’t. Therefore, good riddance to the single worst factor that has kept the computer community stuck in The Dark Age of Computing. The sooner Microsoft disintegrates the better. The future is sick of waiting. 😛