Microsoft Office 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office 2016

products.office.com

10 pointspolskibus7 comments

I read the page and the linked "What's New" page, and still cannot tell you what, if anything, they added. Bing integration?

Random aside: So I know this subscription software business model is extremely popular. Microsoft currently still sell Office as boxed software. But what happens when they stop?

When everyone pays e.g. $10/month just to keep using the software, what is Microsoft's financial motivation for improving it? I ask the same thing about Adobe/Creative Cloud.

The subscription system can make sense for customers when a market has legitimate competition. But with MS Office and Photoshop, they're by far the largest shareholder of the market, so they could effectively stop developing the software (beyond trivial updates and bug fixes) and there isn't a darn thing anyone could do about it (i.e. you cannot stop paying, since it is a professional tool with no viable alternative).

No motivation. That's what happened with the IE, isn't it? Now I can only hope that's true and MS getting lazy with innovation/changes will cause real competitors to appear in a year or two.

Then again, there's a big difference between office and Photoshop. Office is in a way complete now - they can work on making it nicer forever, but as far as the basic package people know goes (excel, word, pp), is there really anything new everybody expected?

At least this suite is dated slightly into the future, for just a tad extra shelf longevity. I would have thought Office would eventually follow the footsteps of Windows, though, and drop the dates by now.

> I would have thought Office would eventually follow the footsteps of Windows, though, and drop the dates by now.

Or we could just call it Office '68 since we're finally getting real-time collaboration features[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Windows dropped the dates because it lasts longer than Office or Visual Studio versions does.

Microsoft makes more money selling new versions of Office and Visual Studio than it does with Windows. So Office and Visual Studio can still go by dates and expire into the near future.

Windows 10 is sort of like Mac OSX, the last version but will keep getting updates. 10.1 will be next followed by 10.2 etc.

Nice. I pay $100/year for the famiy edition of Office 365, mainly so my wife and I each get 1 gig on OneDrive. I am updating the Office apps to the 2016 version right now.

I like subscription models when it seems like a good deal. Office 365 seems like a good deal to me!

Anyone know if the font rendering issue was fixed? The email reading pane in Outlook (on Windows) didn't do any subpixel smoothing, and so the fonts looked fugly as a result. Hopefully they fixed it.

Office for Mac 2016 doesn't seem to have this issue though.

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