“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