Ballmer Hints At 'Metro-ization' of Office 302
CWmike writes "Microsoft's CEO strongly hinted this week that the company will craft a Metro-style version of the next Office suite. 'You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style,' Ballmer told a Wall Street analyst. Metro, a tile- and touch-based interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7, would be a massive change for Office, one that would dwarf the 'ribbonization' that set off a firestorm of complaints about Office 2007's new look. The criticism died down, and Microsoft later extended the ribbon in Office 2010 and Windows 7. It will ribbonize other components of Windows 8, notably the OS's file manager. One analyst believes Metro Office is a done deal. 'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"
There's a patch (Score:5, Insightful)
"The criticism died down"... oh really? (Score:3, Insightful)
According to whom? On what evidence?
Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.
A dumb idea, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of those really dumb ideas that I hope catches on. Like... well... I can't think of another example.
The reason why it's dumb should be obvious: they're trying to port a program with an input that's 99% keystrokes over to a device that has no keyboard.
The reason why I hope it catches on is that it might encourage tablet hardware designers to start seriously considering adding some kind of hardware keyboard to their devices. No, the on-screen keyboard doesn't count. I have a touchscreen netbook and I still claim it's superior to tablets in almost every respect, but its weaknesses (shorter battery life, bulkier than a tablet, takes too long to power up) keep me from just keeping it in my pocket and using it whenever I have a spare 5 minutes.
Between the addition of a keyboard and a some of the tablet designers finally getting it through their heads that the only way to beat Apple is on price, I might just break down and buy a tablet.
Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)
After Ribbons, it has become extremely difficult to think up ways to make MS Office worse. Continuing to do so shows an unbelievable level of commitment and effort.
Do they understand GUI design? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stacks (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life. It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance [slashdot.org] of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby. More and more horsepower and storage, and damn the wattage. Many people do things like play games, create and edit digital content, and other things that continue to soak up compute cycles without any foreseeable limit. Google isn't stupid or shortsighted. I suspect they and Apple have a very good idea of what role phones will play over the next 20 years or so.
Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them.
Re:"The criticism died down"... oh really? (Score:3, Insightful)
jwegman might not be the target market, but I sure am, as an employee in a Fortune Global 500 company with an IT department so conservative that we finally migrated company laptops/desktops to Vista and Office 2007 last year. That is not a typo. We migrated to Vista after 7 came out. This was allegedly because certain intranet applications were not certified to work with Windows 7, but anyway.
I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office, and neither is everyone else in my department. We grudgingly accepted the "upgrade" only because wey were receiving a bunch of Office 2007 files from customers that Office 2003 converter couldn't grok. If we have to go through another gratuitous change in UI so soon, I guarantee you that there will be upset managers with pitchforks outside the IT department. The IT department is aware of this.
So the consequence is that we will not get an upgrade beyond Windows 7 and Office 2010 until Microsoft withdraws enterprise support from each. Which will be a long, long, long time, if XP is any indication. A few slashdotters revolting may not get Microsoft's attention, but a megacorporation with 10,000+ licenses should. (And if it doesn't, Steve Ballmer ought to be fired. We're the customer segment paying for his lunch money, you know.)
Re:Linux, still here, still free (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple and iPad are slowly, but surely, fracturing Microsoft's monopoly. When "does it run Windows apps?" becomes irrelevant, because you can do what you want to do and need to do on any platform, Microsoft's whole house of cards will start collapsing.
It will be years yet, but MS is losing its monopoly, and that's all it has. Being a cheat and bully is all they know how to do now.
Re:A dumb idea, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
.
Mobility seems cool to some people, but I don't really move around that much, and frankly find all these people pretending to be productive on their mobile devices are really just using them as excuses for impoliteness to those physically present around them. I'm perfectly happy to sit here, maintain my forums, trade stocks, write articles for publication on a good old fashioned box PC (well, yeah, it has displays that would shame the matrix, and 512 cuda cores along with an i7, so not that plain or that old fashione). I RUIN keyboards at no longer than 6 months intervals, typing way way over 120 wpm if I'm excited, and looking at this one (about 4 months) no numbers/letters on the keys, yet some big dips where my nails have actually eaten away the plastic. I will never, ever, be happy with a little texty keyboard, a touch screen one, or even my fairly nice laptop, which I do no creative work on whatever - it's too hard to type fast on that tiny thing (made for midgets?) and you're always accidentally clicking it's little smear-screen "mouse" when it's least handy. To hell with that. Just gimme a regular box.
Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done. /rant
I won't mind seeing the end of that brain dead bloated office suite. Haven't used it for years anyway. When I wrote my digital signal processing book, the publisher requested I NOT use junk like that -- just get the content right, we have people to make it pretty as we like - and we don't like having to deal with the junk most authors think makes their work better looking (in error). So, being a windows guy then, I used notepad(!). Of course, for the last decade, I don't run windows anymore anyway, sucks hard compared to linux. If I need it for some reason, there's virtual box...windows in a sandboxed window is about right for that piece of utter crap.
Re:MS ahead of the game for once? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what exactly are they copying?
Apple's tablet OS design ideas.
Which OS design ideas? Be specific because it can't be the GUI which is completely different and follows completely different principles (yes I'm just talking about Metro, of course the fact that it can still run a Windows 7 alike desktop is completely different).
So what is it? Lower level OS architecture? Can't be. E.g. Apple managed to barely fix ASLR only in Lion. Microsoft has it working since ages.
It must be gestures then. Who would have thought that once touchscreen technology advanced, things could be operated touching a screen. No, it can't be, concepts have been around for a decade and something real was already around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface [wikipedia.org] (besides all sort of other tablets, I refer to the surface because from a design concept standpoint has been by far the richest).
Uhm, maybe is the design concept of having a matrix of icons? Pretty looks like my Windows desktop since the last 15 years. Thanks, I'll stay with my Metro tiles that actively display something useful and don't look so Win3.1
No, but WP7's redesign is a direct result of Apple's 2007 entry into the market.
Yep, then they invented a time machine and went back to 2006 to release the Zune with an interface that looks like the genesis of Metro. But the point is another one, so, after all, they didn't copied, they were only forced to re-design? And the big part of that re-design of WP7 vs WP6.5 was the interface?
Like I said, the tablet design ideas. Those tablets that have been around since 2001 simply used the standard Windows GUI. That's why they were a market failure.
So now you switched from OS design to general tablet design. And the failure was the Windows GUI. Not that batteries lasted nothing. Not the weight (couldn't even be used to make a presentation, your arm would hurt if you had to keep it in hands for 1 hour). Not that they were slow as hell. Not that touchscreen technology was a joke. Nope. Nothing. Just the GUI. Everyone was waiting fur such an inspired GUI from Apple. Just swipes, pokes and tons of small apps.
I tell you what: iPads right now are good for coach surfing, watching some videos, reading books (although I prefer e-ink), playing a limited set of games, casually reading e-mails. That's pretty much it (ok, there are some niches like music composers and such, but I'm talking about the mass. If you want to write something seriously, you need an external keyboard. For some some other stuff, a pen would be very useful. We'll see what happens when MS tablet will be released on different form factors with the best of both worlds (Windows Desktop and Metro). I predict that once Excel and Outlook will ship on Metro, a lot of managers will throw their iPads out of the window.
As for the Newton, not sure why you seem to think it doesn't apply, since you seem to be talking about the form factors and not the designs behind them.
Because we are talking about who copied who and if we go back to PDAs then even there Apple was not the first one and the Newton was pretty much a failure. MS came later with CE devices and that was a lot more successful. Not even only in the consumer space, all over different devices (warehouses, hospitals etc.)
Matrix of icons in the GUI? ROTFL...
What?
You struggle to keep focus? We are talking about MS copying Apple, so where is the matrix of icons in Metro? You know, Metro tiles are not just square/rectangular icons. They actively convey information. Yet, in the iOS world a matrix of icons seems to be such an innovation (Apple even put it in Lion). How could MS fail to copy such a fundamental innovation! FWIW the ROTFL was a huge laugh at all the innovation from Apple. Icons. Lots of them.
As someone who has tested Win8... (Score:5, Insightful)
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.
Re:There's a patch (Score:4, Insightful)
(It's not really a library, btw.)
No, but parsing that as "lib re-office" is awesome.