4 ms·
They should make Office free. These days, more and more non-techie friends are starting to use OpenOffice on their own. While OO quality is no where near Micros
by yeukhon 13y ago
They should make Office free. These days, more and more non-techie friends are starting to use OpenOffice on their own. While OO quality is no where near Microsoft Office's, OO writer and Powerpoint are good enough for simple usage. And people, don't make fancy PP anymore. They just need something that can read ppt and something they can play.
- TsomArp 13y agoYeah, right. Office is MS cash cow. If they charged a reasonable amount for monthly use, that would be good. Lets say, 1 dollar per month. 3 dollar for 4 users family pack. That would be great.
- Steko 13y agoI got a license for home use from my company for a one time payment of under $10. So millions of people probably have a deal that's even better than what you're asking for.
- ekianjo 13y agoSame here. But I don't even use it and default to LibreOffice all the time (I only use Linux nowadays).
- Steko 13y agoOpposite case for me. In the past, anytime I had to use Libre/OpenOffice for more than 15 minutes made me feel like blowing my brains out.
- ekianjo 13y agoWell I've never really liked the new UI paradigm in Office 2007 and beyond: it's just very messy to do even simple things. With LibreOffice there are certainly some UI issues as well, but it's closer to Office 2003 in terms of how things are organized.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoIn an efficient market, in the long run, the price of a unit of software would approach the marginal cost of a unit of software. I wonder how long it will be until essentially all software is free, and all the services are run more or less at cost (as the economists would put it, they can earn profits, just not economic profits). But in the long run, as they say, we're all dead ;)
- anigbrowl 13y agoThat's only true in cases of perfect competition, which mainly obtains for commodities. Products with different features are examples of monopolistic competition, because different products are not automatic substitutes for each other.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoI think you misunderstand a little. That's not the consequence of an efficient market, that's the definition of an efficient market. ANY market where the price of an item is higher than its marginal cost is an inefficient one. (The cost includes opportunity cost, though, so it's not like the widget factory needs to make zero accounting profit on the operation). It's quite probable, of course, that software in the general case is prone to market inefficiencies, especially in the short run: there are high fixed costs associated with producing software. Yet extant software is so stupidly easy to copy that it's unthinkable that, thousands of years hence, things like WORD PROCESSORS will have a good reason for costing money. So how long will it take to get there?
- smurf_account 13y agoNot quite what you asked for, but there is a $100/yr or $10/mo plan for 5 people that also includes OneDrive storage and Skype minutes. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-premium/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-premium/ Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft
- swivelmaster 13y agoBig companies still need the Office/Exchange combo and will pay handsomely for it. Maybe we'll see a decent consumer version for free, but Office in general will always be a major chunk of MSFT's revenue.
- MichaelGG 13y agoAdd in Lync. After seeing a demo and getting our small office on Lync, I can't imagine going back to other crappy PBXes and their version of "Unified" communications/messaging. Most of them thing adding a toolbar to Outlook means it's a solved problem. Being able to screen share, conference call, regular calling/transferring/etc. in addition to secure IM and all that - it's really slick.
- BuckRogers 13y agoWe use Lync, and ya, if they made it lighter weight and removed the bugs it would be merely OK.
- sliverstorm 13y ago"Merely OK" is pretty damn good when everything else is "truly shitty"
- adrr 13y agoThey make so much money off office. We buy licenses for almost every person at the company just because there's no equivalent to excel. Only windows boxes in our office are the finance guys who can't adapt to excel on the Mac.
- josh-wrale 13y agoExcel really has no equal, unfortunately.
- Camillo 13y agoYou could almost say that it... excels.
- sizzle 13y agodid not laugh, 0/10 would not read again.
- smacktoward 13y agoAll you need now is the David Caruso sunglasses and the "YEAAAAAAAAAH".
- pcurve 13y agoYup. Excel is the best IT requirement documentation tool, with its auto-filter and indentation (using columns) Full traceability too. Just look at your emails in Outlook, and tie 'em all together.
- smacktoward 13y agoMake it free for home/educational/personal use then, with liberal definitions of those terms, and keep on charging enterprises. Enterprise licensing is where the money is for a product like Office anyway, and those customers actually prefer having to pay for something over getting the same thing for free. Meanwhile, all those people using the free version will be churning out lots of documents in Office file formats, adding to the value of having a copy of Office around. That in turn makes it more attractive to paying customers.
- onwardly 13y agoI'll just say that design quality of presentations, especially for startups who need credibility, is extremely important. Powerpoint- while it doesn't do it for you- is the easiest way to look credible without doing all of your slides in Adobe software. For internal company presentations, perhaps it doesn't make sense to do fancy powerpoints. But if you can't make a presentation that looks credible, it betrays confidence in your ability to deliver on a product/service that is legitimate.
- KC8ZKF 13y agoIn other words, salesmanship versus communication. See Tufte & al.
- greggman 13y agoI'm going to admit up front I'm probably hopelessly out of touch. I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I can't figure out why most people would need Office today. Like I said I'm out of touch but... If I write docs for publication it's HTML. If I write for correspondence it's email If I write for product design it's probably a wiki. Something the entire team can edit. I am in no way suggesting that people don't have legit uses for Office or OpenOffice. I am saying that I have not had a legit use for Office in 6+ years. Those few times I need to make a sign for party or a few page letter Google docs works fine. Even presentations I've done in Google docs just fine. Spreadsheets work fine as well. They can even be scripted if you want to do crazy stuff. Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed? Especially the Hacker News crowd. Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?
- Silhouette 13y agoWhy would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed? Much larger feature set. Privacy. Robustness and future-proofing. Shall we go on? Do you find you need Office or Open Office still? Sure. I've never used word processors much for professional work, as I find different tools of one kind or another are usually a better choice for preparing any given documentation. But there is more to office suites than word processors. Spreadsheets, in particular, are still the most convenient tool for many administrative tasks.
- bnolsen 13y agoI always find gnumeric to be plenty powerful for doing any spreadsheet stuffs I need to do. No I don't get fancy, just mess with columns and formulae and statistical analysis.
- pacaro 13y agoExcel is a great tool for a developer.