Seanification

MG Siegler has been covering the fiasco surrounding the supposed Office for iPad, and posits and interesting theory: what if Microsoft is set to announce Office for iPad at the iPad 3 launch next month?

I think if Microsoft were to launch Office for iPad, the iPad 3 launch would give them the best possible publicity they could get. I think this theory is quite feasible.

But is it too late for Microsoft? I tend to agree with Patrick Rhone’s post: Microsoft’s biggest mistake was allowing the world to realise they didn’t need Office at all. While bringing Office to iPad will certainly legitimise the iPad as a work device, there are also a lot of people who bought an iPad and discovered that it was possible to do everything they wanted to do without Microsoft’s software. It seems silly, but this is a massive revelation to some people.

So while I tend to believe we will see an Office for iPad launch along with iPad 3, I don’t believe Microsoft will ever regain their dominance. It seems unlikely they would sell Office as cheaply as the iWork suite, and as more and more people move away from Windows their lock-in is far from guaranteed.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/vision/

I suppose the point of this video is to convince us to stick with their current mediocre products with the hope that they will some day be enjoyable to use. If we don’t, we’ll regret Microsoft’s incompatibility with competing standards when we want to switch!

Considering how little progress Microsoft have made in the last ten years, it seems a bit rich to think this stuff is possible in the next ten.

At least they get rid of the Ribbon.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jun11/06-01corporatenews.aspx
Looks very interesting. I really think the Windows Phone 7 interface, and this new Windows 8 interface that clearly takes inspiration from Phone, is some of Microsoft’s best work in the last decade. It’s really refreshing to see them not just copying Apple like they’ve previously done, but actually coming up with their own concepts and different approaches that actually seem really workable and nice to use.
This is what Tablet PCs could have been if not for Microsoft’s ineptitude earlier in the decade. Then it would have been Microsoft, not Apple, that was responsible for the tablet era.

(Source: daringfireball.net)

http://halfblog.net/mac-pundit-vs-windows-pundit

A comparison between the ideals of an Apple fanatic and a Windows defender. It illustrates the difference between the typical user of each platform, and why those in one camp will never be happy in the other… and why there will always be both camps.

How can you explain that stuff to a person who doesn’t even see design? To them, Apple products must just look expensive.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

I’ve been bagging Google again recently, but at least they don’t completely rip off the competition. Microsoft has definitely reached a new low.

Update: some more detail, from searchengineland.com:

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

When Bing launched in 2009, the joke was that Bing stood for either “Because It’s Not Google” or “But It’s Not Google.” Mining Google’s searches makes me wonder if the joke should change to “Bing Is Now Google.”

(via Andy Baio via Daring Fireball)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/8365-Experienced-Points-Games-for-Windows-FAIL

Games for Windows Live is one of the main reasons I no longer play games on Windows. While I never went through the experience Shamus Young goes through in this article, it seems clear that any games publisher who uses Games for Windows Live with their games doesn’t care at all about their customers.

My limited exposure to Games for Windows Live came with the game Dawn of War II. I purchased the game through Steam. As such, the decision to include Games for Windows Live as part of the game was extremely baffling, since the functionality it offered was duplicated through Steam. Here was a publisher who certainly didn’t care how poor a user experience their game offered. Tying the playing of the game to Games for Windows Live was a massive mistake: I can’t play even a single player game without having to update to the latest version of Games for Windows Live and logging in to verify I’m still not a pirate.

I had my share of crashes and flakiness with Games for Windows Live, but that’s to be expected with a Microsoft Product. But it was clear to me with Games for Windows Live that the development team thought a shiny interface was all the good usability they needed. It is so painful to use. When a friend invites you to a game, it requires multiple clicks to get into the message service, see the invitation, and accept it. How about a single click to accept as soon as you get the invitation? It also runs painfully slow unless you have the finest gaming rig available to Man, so those multiple clicks take longer than anyone would want.

Yes, I had some fun playing Dawn of War II. But the crappiness of Games for Windows Live highlighted to me how Windows games developers only care about taking your money, and I haven’t bought a Windows games since.

John Gruber:

They’re all horrendous — Comic Sans needed improved OpenType features? — but will likely prove popular with the sort of people who do “design” work using Office for Windows.