Full traceability too. Just look at your emails in Outlook, and tie 'em all together.
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.
The service/software may not be used for commercial,
non-profit, or revenue-generating activities.
Otherwise I pay like $10 a month for the full office 365 suite, which is rather cheap.
Being able to screen share, conference call, regular calling/transferring/etc. in addition to secure IM and all that - it's really slick.
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?
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.
I could use LibreOffice, as it supports Excel 2004 XML files, but Office is cheap enough and LibreOffice annoying enough that it's worth my time to just use the real thing rather than run the risk of a psychotic, gouge-my-eyes-out break from the still-horrible-in-2014 LibreOffice UX.
If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.
and it isn't so much about privacy for me though. I am not a journalist; I don't have sensitive information I need to hide from others.
I can live without all of the rest. It's not only a great tool for my own use, but it's widespread enough to be a de facto standard.
The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one.
Just a thought.
As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad
Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping
the list goes on...
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets
I'm not suggesting you should give up Excel. Just pointing out the features you listed are available should you decide to take a look.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-premium/
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft
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 ;)
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?
So millions of people probably have a deal that's even better than what you're asking for.
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.