Office 365 - What on earth for?

Walking in the clouds, sort of: a review of Microsoft Office 365, a subscription based service built around Office, with focus on look & feel, Outlook, Calendar, Office software download and setup, and site publishing features, including confusing and non-inutitive design, sluggish interface, too many conflicts, wizards and messages, no true cloud capability, and many other problems. Do take a look.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/office-365.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

Not running any business with this, so can't say much about it. But I agree with the conclusion.

 

I'd get Office 2003 just to save a ton of money.

Office In The Cloud? Meh - and I don't care for my personal data being under Microsoft's control!

 

I feel that microsoft need to rethink office 365 and office 2013.
for office 2003,2007 and 2010 it costs home users around £75 for 10 years of support if you brought in the first year and you could install on multiple machines.
office 2013 costs around £90 for installation on one machine.
office 365 offers installing on multiple machines, gives you some skydrive storage and some skype minutes and costs around £75 per year. what home user uses office enough to justify £75 a year?

for business use office 365 is a different thing. businesses use office every day so the costs could be some what justified.

 

We use Office 2007. My wife, who operates a small home business can't see the point of paying yearly for something we've already got and which works perfectly for her.

Granted, this isn't a large business employing many people, just us. We ran an ancient version of Office for years and finally upgraded to 2007. She says we'll stay with 2007 until MS figures out a way to create an OS on which it won't work.

 

Certainly not this one.

 

I have been running Office 2007 for years. My wife recently signed up for a class at the local community college and Office was required for her degree. And, the class required Office 365. So, she had to buy it. Luckily, she got a student discount (like $75 for 2 pc license).

I got a little excited thinking that I could finally upgrade my 2007 version. In fact, I even tried to install it. However, once installed, it crashed every time I started to run it. Luckily, I used AX64 right before installing it. So, using AX64, I reverted to the earlier snapshot.

Since then, I have looked at Office 365 on my wife's computer and I'm ultimately glad that I don't have it installed. It's a train wreck! Unfortunately, she has to use it. Even though I could install it essentially for free (since I have a 2 PC license and one is unused), I choose not to. No, thank you; I'll stick with 2007 version.

 

These unfriendly, exloitative, gimmicky, rentware,
cloud based, disenfranchisement ventures, mock the customers and users and take them for complete idiots, trying to make them like cows to be constantly milked. Developers should concentrate on what users want from software and not the generation of perpetual income streams thought up by halfwitted overpaid sales goons.

 

Well said!

 

sadly it seems more and more software will be heading this way. and sadly ill be using less and less software =)

 

The best office software whilst being the most inaccessible. I want to buy my software not rent it. Unfortunately the new restrictions around the "buy only" option make 2013 a no go. LibreOffice does the things I need for free.

 

@sdmod

 

The main problem I have with Office 2013 is the low contrast interface. It is mostly white and the limited "themes" option only adds a little grey - very hard on the eyes. AFAICT there is no way to change this. I have to wonder about a corporate culture where decisions like this are made and then they refuse to respond to user feedback.

 

I agree.. but it's called a monopoly. They don't respond to user feedback because they don't have to. But I think in the end, this behavior will eventually bite them where it hurts.

 

Same here but most certainly gladly...

Vote with your money.

I agree, if I pay for something I better own it.

 

Honestly, there are so many good free alternatives. OpenOffice just seems to get better. I've been using it for over five years.

 

The main problem I see with OO and similar alternatives is the lack of a calendering app like Outlook that can be used to sync across devices, specifically gmail and android phones. When an open source equivalent appears I'll be able to do without MS Office completely.

 

Office 2013 in general is a train wreck with very little thought that went into the product besides some UI flourishes and changing the color scheme to a garish white. 365 is a just a monetization attempt.

But I will say that $100 for 5 pc's/year = $20/pc/year, which is not a bad price at all and is in fact cheaper than buying a desktop version. For that you also get 25GB on Skydrive, right? For a lot of people it might make sense since they won't have to worry about updates, local installs etc.

This is the way all software is going I fear. Its all dumbed down, designed to appeal to the Facebook generation who have the attention span of a gnat, and power users and serious office workers be damned!

 

I just use OO as a word processor & a program to run Impress (Powerpoint) files on. If you only need a word processor AbiWord can open & save MS files. Both work for me, I have no need to synchronise across anything. Therefore I have no need of MS Office. *Simples*

 

It's great that OO meets your needs, but I was making the point more generally that OO and LO don't have a calendaring app and so can't fully replace MS Office. The free suites won't be real contenders until they include an Outlook equivalent IMHO.

 

I suppose it would help if I knew what a 'calendaring app' actually was. It sounds like an unnecessary complication to me.

 

I believe he's talking about Outlook. It is an email app, a calendaring app, a task app, plus more. In a business environment, I've not run across anything that can do it as well as it does it.

 

the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird is a pretty good calendering app.

 

I just don't see what it has to do with word processing & presentation programs.

 

The thread is entitled Office 365. Office 365, like all Office products, includes Outlook. For many, including myself, the only reason we still use MS Office instead of other office suites is purely the inclusion of Outlook. Outlook is an amazing application that is very powerful if used correctly. None of the other office suites have anything close to Outlook's functionality.

I believe that's all the previous poster was alluding to.

P.S. According to this link, Outlook is the 2nd most popular email client being used worldwide: http://emailclientmarketshare.com/