Topic: Productivity

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    Microsoft Announces Non-Cloud Office 2019 to Release in 2018 (Sep 26, 2017)

    Today’s Ignite announcements appear to be far less notable than yesterday’s, but there’s still one biggish one: Microsoft has announced that its non-cloud version of Office will have its next major release next year, and will be called Office 2019 (apparently borrowing from car manufacturers’ tendency to decouple model years from calendar years). Microsoft refers to this version of Office as “perpetual” because it still uses the old perpetual licensing model associated with boxed and downloaded software rather than the subscription model associated with Office 365. The latter is now the main way Microsoft wants to sell Office, but in recognition of the complexity and sluggishness of many corporate IT departments, it has to continue to sell using the old model as well, and this release is really just a way to package up many of the incremental improvements made in Office 365 into a single version for those customers. That highlights some of the challenges of straddling the legacy and cloud worlds in software, and of course of the fact that Microsoft is the only major company now charging for productivity software, while Apple and Google offer their suites for free to individual users.

    via Microsoft

    Microsoft Begins Bundling Windows and Office for Businesses (Jul 10, 2017)

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    Amazon Considered a Bid for Slack (Jun 15, 2017)

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    ★ Apple Tweaks its iPad Pro Line and Further Optimizes iOS for iPad and AR (Jun 5, 2017)

    Apple today upgraded its iPad Pro lineup and announced a new version of iOS with big changes for the iPad as well as support for AR. The major theme in both the hardware and software aspects of the iPad announcements was productivity, where Apple continues to push the iPad Pro as a potential laptop replacement. The hardware changes improve performance across the board while specifically tweaking the ratio between screen and device size for the smaller iPad Pro in a change that likely foreshadows what Apple will do in a more dramatic way in the Fall with the iPhone. Just as the Mac lineup became more powerful with today’s announcements, so the iPad is becoming more powerful as a potential computer replacement, and the iOS changes specific to the iPad further that message, with support for a much wider range of multitasking scenarios and other more sophisticated features. For the first time, the iPad version of iOS feels like it’s gaining a truly distinct identity that’s really optimized for heavy-duty productivity tasks, and it will be interesting to see how the OS feels on the iPads not designed for pro use, because a number of user interface elements and conventions will change as a result. However, the other big change in today’s iOS announcements is support for AR through ARKit for developers, which is Apple’s first foray into AR. Notably, whereas the VR support in the Mac is primarily aimed for today at creation of VR content, Apple’s AR push is much more end-user centric, and will enable developers to quickly and easily create a range of AR apps and games for the iPhone and iPad. Whereas smartphone-centric AR today is very photo- and video-centric and dominated by companies like Snapchat and more recently Facebook, Apple’s platform approach could dramatically expand the use of AR in smartphone apps and move smartphone-based AR forward significantly in terms of mainstream adoption.

    via Apple (iOS) and Apple (iPad Pro)

    Google’s Education Strategy Profiled in New York Times (May 15, 2017)

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    ★ Microsoft Unveils a Big Education Push Including Operating System, Hardware, Apps (May 2, 2017)

    Microsoft today held an education-focused event in New York City, at which it announced a stripped-down version of Windows, new end-user and teacher/administrator apps, and new hardware for the education market. This is by far the biggest and most comprehensive education push we’ve seen from any of the three big OS vendors, and is clearly intended to reassert Microsoft’s pre-eminent position in the education domain. What was evident from the first part of the event was how committed Microsoft is to making this work, and it began with an impassioned and personal talk from CEO Satya Nadella about his own family background and how education made a difference. Just as Microsoft’s AI mantra has been about democratizing the technology, so he now talks about democratizing educational opportunity. That’s a worthy goal, and Microsoft’s new announcements are a great way to try to bring that about, but Microsoft was also admirably realistic about the role technology plays in education: it assists and empowers but can’t replace committed teachers and parents or educational institutions. I have separate posts about Windows 10 S (here) and Surface Laptop (here). But I like the way Microsoft is introducing education into many of its existing products, including Office, Minecraft, Intune, and so on. Treating education as a first party audience alongside consumers and enterprises makes perfect sense, and is the route others have already taken. What Microsoft announced today feels like it will move its story forward in education considerably. Both Google and Apple have developed more comprehensive stories in education over the past couple of years too, but Microsoft’s arguably goes further, though developer events from the other two in the next six weeks could redress that balance a little.

    via VentureBeat

    ★ Microsoft Misses on Revenue as Hardware Weakness Partly Offsets Cloud Strength (Apr 27, 2017)

    Microsoft was one of numerous big tech companies that reported Q1 2017 financial results (its fiscal Q3 results) this afternoon, and the only one of the big three to miss on revenue. That revenue miss was largely due to a shortfall in hardware revenue as Surface had its first big year on year decline in a year and a half due to a lack of new mass market hardware, and phone revenue dropped to essentially zero. However, these two businesses together make up just 4% of Microsoft’s revenue, which continues to be dominated by software and to an increasing extent services, while growth is dominated by the move to the cloud. Microsoft’s cloud revenue run-rate is now at an annualized $15.2 billion, compared to Amazon’s $14.5 billion in actual annual revenue, though Microsoft’s definition of cloud here is far more expansive than Amazon’s. The productivity business had a particularly strong growth quarter at over 20%, while the Intelligent Cloud segment also improved a little to just over 10%. But margins continue to  fall overall as the newer cloud services generate less profit than Microsoft’s old massively profitable software business did, and that picture isn’t likely to change. Microsoft is growing again after both lapping the introduction of Windows 10 and the revenue deferral associated with the new business model, and also getting past the biggest drops in the phone business, but it’s mostly doing so by doubling down on enterprise products and services while its consumer and hardware businesses mostly continue to struggle to find growth.

    via Microsoft

    Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork Apps for Mac and iOS Free for All Users (Apr 18, 2017)

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    Microsoft Teams goes live with new email integration, enterprise bots – ZDNet (Mar 14, 2017)

    Last week Google announced its Slack competitor, and this week Microsoft is announcing the availability of its previously announced entry in this space: Teams. One big difference versus Slack is that Teams will be baked into every Office 365 enterprise subscription rather than being a paid standalone product, which should almost immediately make it available to many more people than Slack. In addition, it will be integrated into other parts of Office more fully than Slack itself. The big question then becomes whose implementation of the concept is better, and also to some extent whether people keen to use something other than email to collaborate will look to a startup or the company that actually runs their email – Microsoft is making the argument that it isn’t actually trying to replace email but instead offer another way to collaborate when email doesn’t make sense. To some extent, that actually has more credibility to me than replacing email entirely, which has always seemed a slightly unrealistic goal for Slack.

    via ZDNet

    Google debuts Cloud Search, a smart search engine for G Suite customers – TechCrunch (Feb 7, 2017)

    The article doesn’t mention Microsoft once, but talks about Google’s consumer products several times, which makes it feel like this is rather missing the point. This is an enterprise offering and therefore goes head on against various Microsoft products and services intended to achieve similar aims (as well as those from Box and other smaller, more specialized enterprise software and service providers). Both Google and Microsoft are focusing on their AI skills as a source of differentiation in enterprise file management, by promising to help employees find the files they need. Search is, of course, a core Google skill, but it operates very differently in an enterprise file system from on the open web, and Microsoft may actually be better placed here given its long history and the massive investment many companies have made in Microsoft tools in this setting.

    via TechCrunch

    Dropbox finally brings its Google Docs competitor out of beta – The Verge (Jan 30, 2017)

    Dropbox is one of those companies I’m constantly surprised (and yet delighted as a power user) has managed to stick around. By focusing on document storage and syncing, it’s arguably at the feature level – something other ecosystems do in the course of offering a much more complete feature set – and yet it’s managed to find a niche for itself, generating an annual run-rate of $1 billion in revenues in the process. It’s survived in recent years largely by moving in the direction of its major rival Box, which has always been enterprise focused, while Dropbox has straddled the consumer-enterprise divide in the past. Though it seems pushing into adjacent areas would be critical for the company’s longer term survival, I’m not at all convinced that it can be competitive against Google Docs or Office, and therefore also not convinced this is where it should be focusing its diversification efforts. I’m still somewhat skeptical that the company can survive in the long run, and it feels like the exception rather than the rule among one-trick pony companies, most of which continue to either die off or be absorbed by one of the big players.

    via The Verge