Office "needs more than a tune-up", says Gates

[Simon]

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has criticised one of the company's biggest cash cows - Microsoft Office - admitting the package needs "more than a tune-up".

Gates, who recently resigned as Microsoft chairman to become a technology adviser to new CEO Satya Nadella, signalled that the company was set to take even greater risks with its long-standing product lines, suggesting big changes were afoot for Office, and possibly Windows, too.

"Office and the other Microsoft assets that we built in the nineties and kept tuning up have lasted a long time," Gates said in an interview with Rolling Stone, conceivably referring to both Office and Windows.

"Now, they need more than a tune-up. But that's pretty exciting for the people inside who say, 'We need to take a little risk and do some new stuff'."

Gates didn't stipulate what that "new stuff" might be, although Microsoft is known to be working on a touch-oriented version of Office for iOS, which it's expected to release ahead of finger-friendly apps for its own OSes.

Read more: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/387589/office-needs-more-than-a-tune-up-says-gates

[Technical Ben]

It would seem, while TVs and to some extent PCs have been media related, they were always packaged as tools. While what they served was media, adds and entertainment.
Think of a builder using his van to get to work, but he uses the radio, gets adds, reads a paper, gets more adds. That's fine, because the van is purchased (though through time does not last ) structurally sound and fit for purpose.

But now, the car company is plastering adds on the dash board, the wind screen, and the paint work. It's charging a "service charge" to just put your key in the ignition, and adding loads of features which benefit only the manufacture.

Only it's not Ford or BMW doing this, it's Microsoft changing the OS and the Office apps. The amount of subliminal/sneaky/clever ways they put their adds on Metro that purely did not exist in previous editions of Windows, is astonishing. They make Google look nieve in it's implementation of adds in Android. Though no doubt Google knows not to scare away customers (they have Apple etc to compete with). But on the PC OS market, MS can only move customers between their own products, so such risky land grab attempts have no natural disincentive to them.

BRB soon, just about to install Start8 on my Laptop....    

[john]

Are Microsoft Ads are something new in Windows 8 ? I haven't noticed them when using XP, Vista or 7 but maybe I'm just good at automatically mentally filtering them out.

I think the problem with WIndows and Office is that it tries to be all things to everyone and as such many who just need to do simple things are either overwhelmed by  the functionality or if they do want to do something a little more advanced have difficulty finding it amongst all the options particularly if their is a major change to the interface and they ony use it ocassionally or use a different version at work.

Both OS and Office are also somewhat constrained by the need to be, as much as possible, backwards compatible with previous versions because people understandably want to use their existing applications on new OS's and organizations migrate to new versions at different times.

[Ray]

Are Microsoft Ads are something new in Windows 8 ? I haven't noticed them when using XP, Vista or 7 but maybe I'm just good at automatically mentally filtering them out.

I haven't seen any Ads in win 8/8.1 either apart from a News/Sports feed etc on the new GUI which you can remove if you don't want them, and as I always boot to the desktop and rarely use the new GUI I'm not that bothered.

[zappaDPJ]

I'd guess the ads are being generated by apps?

[Technical Ben]

I haven't seen any Ads in win 8/8.1 either apart from a News/Sports feed etc on the new GUI which you can remove if you don't want them, and as I always boot to the desktop and rarely use the new GUI I'm not that bothered.

So, who sets the news, weather and sports feeds? I see a shares one too. Not adds, but very much a way of pushing out systems that may change in the future. Sky drive was also offered to me. These may mainly be adverts for more MS services, but it's a change from what they did before. Even their offerings of office were done in a different way to how Win8 displays the information. It's less an "upgrade to office" and "look at our store and all these adds".

But the Store is by definition an add, and search will search the App store too (I think by default in 8.1, I am not sure). If that's not by definition an advert for Apps on the App store I'm not sure what is (which MS take a % cut of, unlike desktop apps, which strangely are not pushed by the system, nothing to do with MS not getting a % of those sales ).