<story><title>Microsoft launches Office for iPad</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/03/27/microsoft-unveils-office-ipad/?utm_medium=Spreadus&amp;utm_source=Twitter&amp;utm_campaign=social%20media&amp;awesm=tnw.to_s3Js0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisdevereux</author><text>The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit.&lt;p&gt;Seems like they&amp;#x27;re missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can&amp;#x27;t assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.&lt;p&gt;If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.&lt;p&gt;Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it&amp;#x27;s vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Livven</author><text>Apparently lots of people (still) don&amp;#x27;t know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word&amp;#x2F;Excel&amp;#x2F;PowerPoint&amp;#x2F;OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here&amp;#x27;s the relevant HN thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=7302221&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you publish&amp;#x2F;upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft launches Office for iPad</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/03/27/microsoft-unveils-office-ipad/?utm_medium=Spreadus&amp;utm_source=Twitter&amp;utm_campaign=social%20media&amp;awesm=tnw.to_s3Js0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrisdevereux</author><text>The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit.&lt;p&gt;Seems like they&amp;#x27;re missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can&amp;#x27;t assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.&lt;p&gt;If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.&lt;p&gt;Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it&amp;#x27;s vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmspring</author><text>There is a trend towards the &amp;quot;subscription model&amp;quot;.  We&amp;#x27;ve seen it with Adobe&amp;#x27;s suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.</text></comment>