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Amazon Planning a Microsoft Office Killer

117 points by jswny 10y ago

clavalle 10y ago
Why?
osullivj 10y ago
Sun failed to pull this one off when they attempted to turn StarOffice into a stick to beat MS. Yes, Google Docs have captured a lot of lightweight users. But it will be tough to persuade power MS Office users to switch, especially given the success of MS's switch to a subscription model.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  I don't know. If you're part of an enterprise license, your goose is pretty much cooked...but for those small business and home users, I think that recurring monthly or yearly charge on the CC statement is going to make them a lot more willing to investigate alternatives.
- mmcconnell1618 10y ago
  Apple also made a run at Microsoft with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Apple is known for intuitive user interfaces and they had some great looking templates that made it easy to create professional documents. The problem is still compatibility with Office. If you're not 100% compatible with the office file format, you aren't going to seen as a viable alternative.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    well, there's also a giant functionality hole, at least for Numbers vs Excel
protomyth 10y ago
"All applications running on AppStream are based in the cloud, so they require no processing power on the target device, with all resources, including storage needs, provided by Amazon." - italics added for emphasis Has the author looked at the processing required by a modern web browser? This is such a BS statement.
- haggy 10y ago
  Was thinking the same thing. Cloud doesn't remove need for local processing power. It's simply shifting into a sandboxed environment (the browser). Ironically this could make many apps much less efficient than their native counterparts so if anything you may end up using more local CPU time thanks to everything moving to the cloud :)
- daenney 10y ago
  So I can't use this offline? And what happens under shitty network conditions?
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Yeah. This might be a selling point for a service doing seriously CPU intensive calculations my computer might not find easy, but for a service editing the sort of documents my 1995 computer could handle it's a negative: the more stuff that's done exclusively on Amazon's servers the less it's handling intermittent connectivity issues by caching views and backing up my incomplete edits
- sp332 10y ago
  You don't need a powerful browser. AppStream runs the app on a server and the client is just a thin client. https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/ https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Is this only for Windows apps with pixels and/or H.264 being streamed to an HTML5 web client? Why would Amazon base a new product on Windows (UWP?) instead of the web?
    - sp332 10y ago
      I don't know. Honestly I think the article is a shot in the dark.
neovintage 10y ago
Anything proclaiming its going to "kill" some other business, likely isn't. Google Docs is a great example of solving a problem that carved out a subsegment of Microsoft Office user base. I don't think any one solution is going to be the all encompassing one like Office has been.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Google Docs is great on a day-to-day basis. Has everything I routinely use and is very streamlined. And I'm fine with firing something else up when I get out of Google Docs' comfort zone.
saurik 10y ago
I want Adobe to make a word processor and then an "operating system" by just pulling a Google and branding Linux; the only non-gaming software that seems to lock most people to Windows or macOS is Office/Work and "everything written by Adobe", and Valve is totally ready to jump ship and the lock in of DirectX is also dwindling in power... I think Adobe could pull it off.
- nolok 10y ago
  See, I understand the wish to leave the windows lock-in behind, but I'm not sure the alternative really exists yet. "Raw" linux, even the likes of ubuntu, is not ready for it, I'm not even sure it ever will be. No, I can't give my dad a linux box and expect him to read the upgrade instruction when his distro moves to system.d or whatever, and fix the likes of "can't update kernel because /boot is full". Of course to anyone who knows anything even remotely about it those are trivial non issues, but to my dad it's a complete show stopper. On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use linux we have in android or chromeos, well, ... Sure, the code is a lot more open source and yada yada, but while I can do whatever I want on my windows box, I suddenly need to hope there is a way to root my own phone/tablet for lots of stuff. That is definitely not where I want my computer to go. Disclaimer: I'm a happy windows user at home, and linux at work. And my phone is Android. I'm not bashing here.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Man I wish Palm hadn't flubbed the hardware and the geek community backed WebOS instead of Android. HTML/JS as a first class citizen, C++ to back it up, boot a kernel over USB, rooting directions printed on their developer website for everyone to see. It had such promise.
    - nolok 10y ago
      If only they hadn't spent a decade going circles producing nothing, it could have been. Just like Blackberry and Nokia could have provided entirely different phone ecosystem, if only they had woken up.
raesene6 10y ago
Interesting, I'm guessing Amazon are doing this as they're concerned at Microsoft getting companies onto Azure as part of a package with Office365. Articles like this one ( http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-to-microsofts-enterprise-saas-cm763317 http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-t... ) show that trend quite clearly That said I'd think it'd be pretty tricky to get something that would compete with Office. Replicating the basic functionality is likely do-able, but the power user functionality of office can be pretty complex (e.g. Macros) and a lot of users are quite attached to it.
zebrafish 10y ago
Spreadsheet functionality is not as intuitive or as seamless aaS as it is on the desktop for whatever reason. I also expect that any product without an on-prem option is going to lose out in the enterprise space.
youdontknowtho 10y ago
Of course they are, except that no one thinks that they will actually kill Office. I'm sure that they can attract some users, but killing Office...Not going to happen, and they are just using the notion as marketing for the "anything but Microsoft" crowd that also happen to be early adopters.
kolbe 10y ago
I just gave a book to one of my friends. Can someone write an article about how I'm creating an "Amazon killer"
nolok 10y ago
As a medium scale business user (<50 employees) of Office365 at one of my companies, this is so much better than buying the old model of Office license that it's obvious this turns profitable. Between the always updated, the no up front payment, the ability to easily change your number of users, ... It's simply a superior solution in every way for me. I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms going five years from now ?). Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still very much trust them for services I pay.
- ksk 10y ago
  Are you talking about E1 plan or the one with desktop apps? Our company got burned with the webapp nonsense pretty bad. We first tried Google docs which were woefully inadequate and buggy and slow, then we switched to the office webapps, which were no better until we finally returned to using desktop apps, and using a local IT service to stick a file server with raid and daily backups. I can never understand how people tolerate webapps for anything serious.
  - nolok 10y ago
    The one with the desktop apps, we pay about 9 euros per user per month. For that price every user gets the latest version of word/excel/powerpoint, as well as a few others that we don't use. Updates are done automatically, and each user is allowed 5 simultaneous installs with their keys (desktop computer, work laptop, phone, ...). Agreed about webapp only offers, I would not buy office 365 for that. In fact we even make a point of removing One Drive because I have no trust in Microsoft with that. For G-suite (google docs/sheets/... for business), I find it works great as an api store that also can give you direct access as sheets/docs/... Non tech people can create stuff (templates, models, stats ...) the way they're used too, and it's super easy to integrate automation into it while keeping everything in a format that Janice from accounting or Bob from support can access in real time with the doc/spreadsheet format they're used to. I find it much better than office's offering for that. But they're definitely not two interchangeable solutions.
turowicz 10y ago
So much for making presentations on the plane.
systems 10y ago
they should start with Excel .. once they have a solid desktop excel replacement, that allow users to at least import their excel sheets and have 100% of the functionality that had in Excel, they have a Path, I think PowerPoint, Work, Access and Outlook are all a lot easier to give up compared to Excel Excel is IT/Computers for many users
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  This is the key requirement for an 'office killer', but also the one all these challengers want to convince themselves they can get away without. I'm certain it would require a tremendous amount of labor. Really, we need something better than Excel, which can bring Excel jockeys out of the weird ghetto of macros and into a true scripting environment. Google has made a valiant effort in this. But in order to get anyone who matters to even look at it seriously, you're going to need to offer compatibility, first.
- nickpeterson 10y ago
  Honestly, excel is so hard to use once the scale reaches a few hundred million that I was forced to build my own drastically scaled down version in order to support my data analysis. It's an interesting project, and the source code isn't too lengthy to get a reasonable amount of functionality. I support a bunch of basic mathematic functions, and derived auto updating columns. I also have some ability to import and export common formats. I'd open source it but I don't want to open source my befunge interpretter which is essential to running my business.
  - ghostly_s 10y ago
    Is this a late April Fools' joke? Your compiler for an esoteric programming language; "the design goal [for which] was to create a language which was difficult to compile"[1], is business-critical? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge
    - cwyers 10y ago
      Not just business-critical, apparently it's a competitive advantage, such that he wants others to not be able to take advantage of it.
alexcroox 10y ago
The trouble with Amazon is everything that isn't their retail site has terrible UX so I'm not hopeful.
- ConceptJunkie 10y ago
  Their software also tends to be very crashy and/or slow. It's like Apple software for Windows, but worse.
- rrdharan 10y ago
  I think the Kindles offer a pretty decent experience (even the Cloud Reader which I occasionally use).
013a 10y ago
Amazon fundamentally does not understand UX. Office is too entrenched and Google Drive has great UX. This product is dead on arrival.
Bedon292 10y ago
As much as it would be nice to have an alternative to MS Office, it seems like a lot of these 'killers' focus on the wrong things that are needed. 1. Completely offline use, including local save, backups etc. Which goes completely against the cloud. But this is something that Microsoft got right with 365. I can install it and use it completely isolated from the internet and still collaborate online if needed. 2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in. 3. Suite interoperability. I need to be able to make a chart in Excel. Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C/V, not some export process) it over to Word in the document, then paste it into PowerPoint for the presentation. Or maybe save it out as a PNG for Latex or something.
- daveguy 10y ago
  If you haven't tried LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/) in a while I highly recommend it. Works great with Zotero for citations and they have fixed a lot of the formatting issues in Writer/Word and data manipulation shortcomings in Calc/Excel. I haven't needed MS Office for 4 months.
  - Dayshine 10y ago
    The problem with LibreOffice is that it has terrible Word compatibility. Documents just come out looking completely different. Tables go over extra pages, text is randomly overlayed, etc.
    - buovjaga 10y ago
      Well, at least we are documenting the problems, you can filter by "docx" to see for yourself: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs So it's easy to jump in, if one has a passion to fix interop issues..
    - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
      In my experience, this typically happens if you're using the manual layout systems, nudging and adjusting image sizes and text boxes pixel by pixel until the output is "perfect." This is brittle even in Word. You should be able to insert a section or paragraph without messing up your whole document. Instead, use paragraph breaks, page breaks, and styles to typeset the document. Choose top/bottom wrapping of images, and keep tables simple and clean. It usually looks better, it's easier to edit later, and it just works in whatever editor you're using - whether Office 97, Office 2017, Google Docs, or exporting to HTML.
jknoepfler 10y ago
Having worked in aws for two years, I have zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual. Also, I'm sorry, amazon has absolutely no strength in enterprise marketing, and Microsoft is king of that realm for a reason.
- dabber 10y ago
  >zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual. Hah, took the words out of my mouth. Prime video is the first example that comes to mind.
  - dawnerd 10y ago
    Hell their main site is a mix of various styles of ui changes from over the years. It's really inconsistent and sometimes confusing. Example being search filters. You can check the prime button but changing another filter may remove it.
    - dabber 10y ago
      Its always been something I've thought about briefly before going about my day, never really in any depth. What do you think the reason is? My thought is, not many people complain loudly so why invest the resources in an overhaul. If it ain't _totally_ broke why rock the boat kinda thing. That or the engineers build the frontend ;-)
      - dawnerd 10y ago
        I think it migh be the result of too much a|b testing. Everything hung feels ultra optimized for whatever metric they're going for that week.
- notahacker 10y ago
  Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer lifestyle gadget" or Apple announcing an enterprise server. They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.
vivekd 10y ago
Why? Amazon already has a great and successful business model, why not focus their efforts on expanding this model rather than trying to compete with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has domain and market mastery? Say what you want about Microsoft, office is ubiquitous, their products are everywhere - so why spend money, time and effort trying to beat them at their own game rather than trying to expand their own core business.
- chillacy 10y ago
  I once heard this theory: that companies release a free product in another area (subsidized by their core business) in order to interfere with the monopoly of another company. For instance Google makes their money in search ads and has a free office suite and operating system. Microsoft makes their money from their office suite and OS, and undercuts google with Bing. Bing/Google Docs never really have to be #1, they just has to take enough market share that the other company can't ignore it when it comes to pricing.
thraway2016 10y ago
There already is an "Office Killer", called LibreOffice. Does absolutely everything any small business or home user could ever need.
- newscracker 10y ago
  I like LibreOffice and I support it with donations too, but many people are already used to MS Office. And LibreOffice Calc, the one I use most, has big time usability problems and bugs. It doesn't have the same keyboard shortcuts as MS Excel. In fact, it chooses keyboard shortcuts that are very different from MS Excel, making usage even more cumbersome even though it hasn't adopted the Ribbon interface from MS and still has the standard pull down menus. It still doesn't have copy paste working well (sometimes, whatever I copy from another program cannot be pasted in it - this has been the case on Windows 7 and Windows 10 for at least a couple of years or longer across versions of LibreOffice 4.x/5.x). In my limited experience, there is no true competitor for MS Excel for those who have used MS Excel.
skdotdan 10y ago
Copying Office and making it a webapp with less features is not killing Office. Not even close. Microsoft Office is legacy software. Its killer won't have anything to do with, it will be totally different. For example, Slack. I mean, killing PowerPoint is not making a webapp to create presentations, but creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary. Ideas: SaaS, ML, cloud dashboards and analytics, communication. Credit: Benedict Evans.
- tincholio 10y ago
  Slack will have a hard time killing office, seeing as MS Teams does pretty much all that Slack does, and integrates with all the rest of Office 365.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    I'm not sure a lot of people that use Slack use Office. I know a lot that use Slack + Google Docs almost exclusively. It's a matter of tradition. Older firms with a large collection of native Office documents need Office. Newer ones without that baggage can be more adaptable.
- xena 10y ago
  So you mean Quip? https://quip.com/ https://quip.com/
  - rubidium 10y ago
    Looks like a kids play thing. MS office with Teams basically does all that already, plus a ton of other things.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  > creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary I think you're missing the point. Presentations are no different than giving a speech with visual aids, with the additional benefit of sharing your notes after the fact. You can give a sales pitch, a conference talk, an internal update, or share some info about your favorite band. Its free form and incredibly versatile. Analytics isn't going to replace a conference talk, or a sales pitch. That's not to mention the wide variety of uses for Excel. It's everything from a financial analysis tool to a digital scratch paper. Slack is fine but it's just a slow irc client with pretty good search.
nkristoffersen 10y ago
Google docs(drive) is already the online killer. So much better than office 365. I doubt amazon can outdo google here.
taksintikk 10y ago
Seems like a futile venture. There are bigger fish to fry.
partiallypro 10y ago
The real reason Amazon wants this is because they've seen Microsoft's cloud growth from productivity software has been incredible and they sell it along side their Azure offering. So far it's working, and AWS growth is slowing. The cloud is eventually going to be a war of margins, and the margin on productivity cloud software is more sticky than VMs, storage, etc. It's also easier, imo to switch cloud providers than it is productivity providers, there's no retraining and the average users across your organization don't see the differences. A developer migrating a VM image and storage accounts is much less of a hassle than having to potentially get IT etc on board to retrain, answer questions, change user settings, deal with complaints about a missing function, etc.
moomin 10y ago
People always underestimate how much work it would be to properly compete with Office. They tend to start with the view that 95% of users don't use 95% of the features. They're right, but have completely missed the point: in an enterprise environment those 5% will completely block adoption. In a bank, the 5% are the traders and the corporate financiers. Here's some Excel features that I would consider essential for those people: * Named Ranges * Array Evaluation * Running a calc on all cores (and don't make me laugh by having your engine in JS) * Charting (Office's is honestly not that great, it's amazing how many alternatives are even worse) * UI Automation (doesn't have to be VBA) * Reuters/Bloomberg prices (this one is hard to achieve on your own, obviously) And that's less than the minimum of what you'd need for the average bank to even _consider_ overcoming sunk costs, legacy implementations and sheer inertia. And I've only talked about one app in the office suite. Being cheaper and easier to deploy frankly ain't going to cut it.
- jm__87 10y ago
  Ugh, I've worked at a few banks with a few diff trading desks and it is annoying how much they love Excel. Excel is such a horrible platform for anything other than some simple spreadsheets, but traders always find a way to work it in to some production system at which point it becomes impossible to remove.
  - moomin 10y ago
    Giving traders Visual Studio is actually remarkably effective...
5555624 10y ago
I use Office at work. Through Microsoft's Home Use Program (HUP) I can buy a copy for home. As long as I can buy a copy for $9.95 -- I've bought the last four versions through HUP -- Amazon doesn't stand a chance. Neither does LibreOffice, even though I've installed it on a FreeBSD laptop and other computers.

117 points by jswny 10y ago

Why?

Sun failed to pull this one off when they attempted to turn StarOffice into a stick to beat MS. Yes, Google Docs have captured a lot of lightweight users. But it will be tough to persuade power MS Office users to switch, especially given the success of MS's switch to a subscription model.

ghostly_s 10y ago
I don't know. If you're part of an enterprise license, your goose is pretty much cooked...but for those small business and home users, I think that recurring monthly or yearly charge on the CC statement is going to make them a lot more willing to investigate alternatives.
mmcconnell1618 10y ago
Apple also made a run at Microsoft with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Apple is known for intuitive user interfaces and they had some great looking templates that made it easy to create professional documents. The problem is still compatibility with Office. If you're not 100% compatible with the office file format, you aren't going to seen as a viable alternative.
- x0x0 10y ago
  well, there's also a giant functionality hole, at least for Numbers vs Excel

protomyth 10y ago

"All applications running on AppStream are based in the cloud, so they require no processing power on the target device, with all resources, including storage needs, provided by Amazon." - italics added for emphasis Has the author looked at the processing required by a modern web browser? This is such a BS statement.

haggy 10y ago
Was thinking the same thing. Cloud doesn't remove need for local processing power. It's simply shifting into a sandboxed environment (the browser). Ironically this could make many apps much less efficient than their native counterparts so if anything you may end up using more local CPU time thanks to everything moving to the cloud :)
daenney 10y ago
So I can't use this offline? And what happens under shitty network conditions?
- notahacker 10y ago
  Yeah. This might be a selling point for a service doing seriously CPU intensive calculations my computer might not find easy, but for a service editing the sort of documents my 1995 computer could handle it's a negative: the more stuff that's done exclusively on Amazon's servers the less it's handling intermittent connectivity issues by caching views and backing up my incomplete edits
sp332 10y ago
You don't need a powerful browser. AppStream runs the app on a server and the client is just a thin client. https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/ https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- walterbell 10y ago
  Is this only for Windows apps with pixels and/or H.264 being streamed to an HTML5 web client? Why would Amazon base a new product on Windows (UWP?) instead of the web?
  - sp332 10y ago
    I don't know. Honestly I think the article is a shot in the dark.

neovintage 10y ago

Anything proclaiming its going to "kill" some other business, likely isn't. Google Docs is a great example of solving a problem that carved out a subsegment of Microsoft Office user base. I don't think any one solution is going to be the all encompassing one like Office has been.

ghaff 10y ago
Google Docs is great on a day-to-day basis. Has everything I routinely use and is very streamlined. And I'm fine with firing something else up when I get out of Google Docs' comfort zone.

saurik 10y ago

I want Adobe to make a word processor and then an "operating system" by just pulling a Google and branding Linux; the only non-gaming software that seems to lock most people to Windows or macOS is Office/Work and "everything written by Adobe", and Valve is totally ready to jump ship and the lock in of DirectX is also dwindling in power... I think Adobe could pull it off.

nolok 10y ago
See, I understand the wish to leave the windows lock-in behind, but I'm not sure the alternative really exists yet. "Raw" linux, even the likes of ubuntu, is not ready for it, I'm not even sure it ever will be. No, I can't give my dad a linux box and expect him to read the upgrade instruction when his distro moves to system.d or whatever, and fix the likes of "can't update kernel because /boot is full". Of course to anyone who knows anything even remotely about it those are trivial non issues, but to my dad it's a complete show stopper. On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use linux we have in android or chromeos, well, ... Sure, the code is a lot more open source and yada yada, but while I can do whatever I want on my windows box, I suddenly need to hope there is a way to root my own phone/tablet for lots of stuff. That is definitely not where I want my computer to go. Disclaimer: I'm a happy windows user at home, and linux at work. And my phone is Android. I'm not bashing here.
- freehunter 10y ago
  Man I wish Palm hadn't flubbed the hardware and the geek community backed WebOS instead of Android. HTML/JS as a first class citizen, C++ to back it up, boot a kernel over USB, rooting directions printed on their developer website for everyone to see. It had such promise.
  - nolok 10y ago
    If only they hadn't spent a decade going circles producing nothing, it could have been. Just like Blackberry and Nokia could have provided entirely different phone ecosystem, if only they had woken up.

raesene6 10y ago

Interesting, I'm guessing Amazon are doing this as they're concerned at Microsoft getting companies onto Azure as part of a package with Office365. Articles like this one ( http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-to-microsofts-enterprise-saas-cm763317 http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-t... ) show that trend quite clearly That said I'd think it'd be pretty tricky to get something that would compete with Office. Replicating the basic functionality is likely do-able, but the power user functionality of office can be pretty complex (e.g. Macros) and a lot of users are quite attached to it.

zebrafish 10y ago

Spreadsheet functionality is not as intuitive or as seamless aaS as it is on the desktop for whatever reason. I also expect that any product without an on-prem option is going to lose out in the enterprise space.

youdontknowtho 10y ago

Of course they are, except that no one thinks that they will actually kill Office. I'm sure that they can attract some users, but killing Office...Not going to happen, and they are just using the notion as marketing for the "anything but Microsoft" crowd that also happen to be early adopters.

kolbe 10y ago

I just gave a book to one of my friends. Can someone write an article about how I'm creating an "Amazon killer"

nolok 10y ago

As a medium scale business user (<50 employees) of Office365 at one of my companies, this is so much better than buying the old model of Office license that it's obvious this turns profitable. Between the always updated, the no up front payment, the ability to easily change your number of users, ... It's simply a superior solution in every way for me. I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms going five years from now ?). Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still very much trust them for services I pay.

ksk 10y ago
Are you talking about E1 plan or the one with desktop apps? Our company got burned with the webapp nonsense pretty bad. We first tried Google docs which were woefully inadequate and buggy and slow, then we switched to the office webapps, which were no better until we finally returned to using desktop apps, and using a local IT service to stick a file server with raid and daily backups. I can never understand how people tolerate webapps for anything serious.
- nolok 10y ago
  The one with the desktop apps, we pay about 9 euros per user per month. For that price every user gets the latest version of word/excel/powerpoint, as well as a few others that we don't use. Updates are done automatically, and each user is allowed 5 simultaneous installs with their keys (desktop computer, work laptop, phone, ...). Agreed about webapp only offers, I would not buy office 365 for that. In fact we even make a point of removing One Drive because I have no trust in Microsoft with that. For G-suite (google docs/sheets/... for business), I find it works great as an api store that also can give you direct access as sheets/docs/... Non tech people can create stuff (templates, models, stats ...) the way they're used too, and it's super easy to integrate automation into it while keeping everything in a format that Janice from accounting or Bob from support can access in real time with the doc/spreadsheet format they're used to. I find it much better than office's offering for that. But they're definitely not two interchangeable solutions.

turowicz 10y ago

So much for making presentations on the plane.

systems 10y ago

they should start with Excel .. once they have a solid desktop excel replacement, that allow users to at least import their excel sheets and have 100% of the functionality that had in Excel, they have a Path, I think PowerPoint, Work, Access and Outlook are all a lot easier to give up compared to Excel Excel is IT/Computers for many users

ghostly_s 10y ago
This is the key requirement for an 'office killer', but also the one all these challengers want to convince themselves they can get away without. I'm certain it would require a tremendous amount of labor. Really, we need something better than Excel, which can bring Excel jockeys out of the weird ghetto of macros and into a true scripting environment. Google has made a valiant effort in this. But in order to get anyone who matters to even look at it seriously, you're going to need to offer compatibility, first.
nickpeterson 10y ago
Honestly, excel is so hard to use once the scale reaches a few hundred million that I was forced to build my own drastically scaled down version in order to support my data analysis. It's an interesting project, and the source code isn't too lengthy to get a reasonable amount of functionality. I support a bunch of basic mathematic functions, and derived auto updating columns. I also have some ability to import and export common formats. I'd open source it but I don't want to open source my befunge interpretter which is essential to running my business.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  Is this a late April Fools' joke? Your compiler for an esoteric programming language; "the design goal [for which] was to create a language which was difficult to compile"[1], is business-critical? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge
  - cwyers 10y ago
    Not just business-critical, apparently it's a competitive advantage, such that he wants others to not be able to take advantage of it.

alexcroox 10y ago

The trouble with Amazon is everything that isn't their retail site has terrible UX so I'm not hopeful.

ConceptJunkie 10y ago
Their software also tends to be very crashy and/or slow. It's like Apple software for Windows, but worse.
rrdharan 10y ago
I think the Kindles offer a pretty decent experience (even the Cloud Reader which I occasionally use).

013a 10y ago

Amazon fundamentally does not understand UX. Office is too entrenched and Google Drive has great UX. This product is dead on arrival.

Bedon292 10y ago

As much as it would be nice to have an alternative to MS Office, it seems like a lot of these 'killers' focus on the wrong things that are needed. 1. Completely offline use, including local save, backups etc. Which goes completely against the cloud. But this is something that Microsoft got right with 365. I can install it and use it completely isolated from the internet and still collaborate online if needed. 2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in. 3. Suite interoperability. I need to be able to make a chart in Excel. Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C/V, not some export process) it over to Word in the document, then paste it into PowerPoint for the presentation. Or maybe save it out as a PNG for Latex or something.

daveguy 10y ago
If you haven't tried LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/) in a while I highly recommend it. Works great with Zotero for citations and they have fixed a lot of the formatting issues in Writer/Word and data manipulation shortcomings in Calc/Excel. I haven't needed MS Office for 4 months.
- Dayshine 10y ago
  The problem with LibreOffice is that it has terrible Word compatibility. Documents just come out looking completely different. Tables go over extra pages, text is randomly overlayed, etc.
  - buovjaga 10y ago
    Well, at least we are documenting the problems, you can filter by "docx" to see for yourself: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs So it's easy to jump in, if one has a passion to fix interop issues..
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    In my experience, this typically happens if you're using the manual layout systems, nudging and adjusting image sizes and text boxes pixel by pixel until the output is "perfect." This is brittle even in Word. You should be able to insert a section or paragraph without messing up your whole document. Instead, use paragraph breaks, page breaks, and styles to typeset the document. Choose top/bottom wrapping of images, and keep tables simple and clean. It usually looks better, it's easier to edit later, and it just works in whatever editor you're using - whether Office 97, Office 2017, Google Docs, or exporting to HTML.

jknoepfler 10y ago

Having worked in aws for two years, I have zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual. Also, I'm sorry, amazon has absolutely no strength in enterprise marketing, and Microsoft is king of that realm for a reason.

dabber 10y ago
>zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual. Hah, took the words out of my mouth. Prime video is the first example that comes to mind.
- dawnerd 10y ago
  Hell their main site is a mix of various styles of ui changes from over the years. It's really inconsistent and sometimes confusing. Example being search filters. You can check the prime button but changing another filter may remove it.
  - dabber 10y ago
    Its always been something I've thought about briefly before going about my day, never really in any depth. What do you think the reason is? My thought is, not many people complain loudly so why invest the resources in an overhaul. If it ain't _totally_ broke why rock the boat kinda thing. That or the engineers build the frontend ;-)
    - dawnerd 10y ago
      I think it migh be the result of too much a|b testing. Everything hung feels ultra optimized for whatever metric they're going for that week.
notahacker 10y ago
Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer lifestyle gadget" or Apple announcing an enterprise server. They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

vivekd 10y ago

Why? Amazon already has a great and successful business model, why not focus their efforts on expanding this model rather than trying to compete with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has domain and market mastery? Say what you want about Microsoft, office is ubiquitous, their products are everywhere - so why spend money, time and effort trying to beat them at their own game rather than trying to expand their own core business.

chillacy 10y ago
I once heard this theory: that companies release a free product in another area (subsidized by their core business) in order to interfere with the monopoly of another company. For instance Google makes their money in search ads and has a free office suite and operating system. Microsoft makes their money from their office suite and OS, and undercuts google with Bing. Bing/Google Docs never really have to be #1, they just has to take enough market share that the other company can't ignore it when it comes to pricing.

thraway2016 10y ago

There already is an "Office Killer", called LibreOffice. Does absolutely everything any small business or home user could ever need.

newscracker 10y ago
I like LibreOffice and I support it with donations too, but many people are already used to MS Office. And LibreOffice Calc, the one I use most, has big time usability problems and bugs. It doesn't have the same keyboard shortcuts as MS Excel. In fact, it chooses keyboard shortcuts that are very different from MS Excel, making usage even more cumbersome even though it hasn't adopted the Ribbon interface from MS and still has the standard pull down menus. It still doesn't have copy paste working well (sometimes, whatever I copy from another program cannot be pasted in it - this has been the case on Windows 7 and Windows 10 for at least a couple of years or longer across versions of LibreOffice 4.x/5.x). In my limited experience, there is no true competitor for MS Excel for those who have used MS Excel.

skdotdan 10y ago

Copying Office and making it a webapp with less features is not killing Office. Not even close. Microsoft Office is legacy software. Its killer won't have anything to do with, it will be totally different. For example, Slack. I mean, killing PowerPoint is not making a webapp to create presentations, but creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary. Ideas: SaaS, ML, cloud dashboards and analytics, communication. Credit: Benedict Evans.

tincholio 10y ago
Slack will have a hard time killing office, seeing as MS Teams does pretty much all that Slack does, and integrates with all the rest of Office 365.
- astrodust 10y ago
  I'm not sure a lot of people that use Slack use Office. I know a lot that use Slack + Google Docs almost exclusively. It's a matter of tradition. Older firms with a large collection of native Office documents need Office. Newer ones without that baggage can be more adaptable.
xena 10y ago
So you mean Quip? https://quip.com/ https://quip.com/
- rubidium 10y ago
  Looks like a kids play thing. MS office with Teams basically does all that already, plus a ton of other things.
ch4s3 10y ago
> creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary I think you're missing the point. Presentations are no different than giving a speech with visual aids, with the additional benefit of sharing your notes after the fact. You can give a sales pitch, a conference talk, an internal update, or share some info about your favorite band. Its free form and incredibly versatile. Analytics isn't going to replace a conference talk, or a sales pitch. That's not to mention the wide variety of uses for Excel. It's everything from a financial analysis tool to a digital scratch paper. Slack is fine but it's just a slow irc client with pretty good search.

nkristoffersen 10y ago

Google docs(drive) is already the online killer. So much better than office 365. I doubt amazon can outdo google here.

taksintikk 10y ago

Seems like a futile venture. There are bigger fish to fry.

partiallypro 10y ago

The real reason Amazon wants this is because they've seen Microsoft's cloud growth from productivity software has been incredible and they sell it along side their Azure offering. So far it's working, and AWS growth is slowing. The cloud is eventually going to be a war of margins, and the margin on productivity cloud software is more sticky than VMs, storage, etc. It's also easier, imo to switch cloud providers than it is productivity providers, there's no retraining and the average users across your organization don't see the differences. A developer migrating a VM image and storage accounts is much less of a hassle than having to potentially get IT etc on board to retrain, answer questions, change user settings, deal with complaints about a missing function, etc.

moomin 10y ago

People always underestimate how much work it would be to properly compete with Office. They tend to start with the view that 95% of users don't use 95% of the features. They're right, but have completely missed the point: in an enterprise environment those 5% will completely block adoption. In a bank, the 5% are the traders and the corporate financiers. Here's some Excel features that I would consider essential for those people: * Named Ranges * Array Evaluation * Running a calc on all cores (and don't make me laugh by having your engine in JS) * Charting (Office's is honestly not that great, it's amazing how many alternatives are even worse) * UI Automation (doesn't have to be VBA) * Reuters/Bloomberg prices (this one is hard to achieve on your own, obviously) And that's less than the minimum of what you'd need for the average bank to even _consider_ overcoming sunk costs, legacy implementations and sheer inertia. And I've only talked about one app in the office suite. Being cheaper and easier to deploy frankly ain't going to cut it.

jm__87 10y ago
Ugh, I've worked at a few banks with a few diff trading desks and it is annoying how much they love Excel. Excel is such a horrible platform for anything other than some simple spreadsheets, but traders always find a way to work it in to some production system at which point it becomes impossible to remove.
- moomin 10y ago
  Giving traders Visual Studio is actually remarkably effective...

5555624 10y ago

I use Office at work. Through Microsoft's Home Use Program (HUP) I can buy a copy for home. As long as I can buy a copy for $9.95 -- I've bought the last four versions through HUP -- Amazon doesn't stand a chance. Neither does LibreOffice, even though I've installed it on a FreeBSD laptop and other computers.