It would be interesting to know what office software Apple itself uses routinely. I cannot imagine their accounting and finance departments using anything but Excel.
what would be the need to use Acrobat Pro on a Mac? I'm not trying to set you up here. I honestly, don't know. I thought Acrobat Pro's whole reason for existing was to produce PDF documents. With Mac you just select "print to PDF" to accomplish that goal. What am I missing??
There is a LOT of functionality in Acobat that isn't in Mac OS X's built in save to PDF. I don't use any of it personally. But I do observe my companion using it for her non-profit and related things. Mostly forms, and mostly filling them out, but also sometimes creating them. Also, using OCR to create text from imported document scans, so the content is indexable and searchable. Can't do that with the built-in Mac PDF writer.
I love having the basics of PDF included in Mac OS; they're really all I personally use. I don't exist in a corporate environment, so I don't know what the common uses are today. But there's WAY more in Acrobat than merely turning a document into a PDF. I always felt most of it was utterly irrelevant and bloated the program to the point of sluggishness... But some people use all that stuff. At least, someone better be using it, or Adobe needs to do a major feature culling.
It would be interesting to know what office software Apple itself uses routinely. I cannot imagine their accounting and finance departments using anything but Excel.
I bet they're still using the older '09 version of iWork. This is why I found it appalling what they did to the suite with the new 2013 version. If their office people use Windows and Office, or even Macs and Office that would be a hugely embarrassing news story. Like when Microsoft was found to be running some of its servers on Linux.
Are the laws completely different in Canada than in the U.S. regarding kids' use of online services?
As far as I know, Google doesn't allow kids under 13 to use services like gmail and google docs due to federal COPPA laws. Because there is no option to use gmail, google docs, etc. without allowing them to create their world-famous, amazingly detailed psychological profiles of you as a user (product), they don't allow kids to use said services without parental sign off. Last time I checked that required more than checking a box on a web page, it was stuff like a photocopy of your passport or driver's license or sending them your credit card data.
It's nothing to do with 'world-famous, amazingly detailed psychological profiles' - according to the COPPA laws, even email addresses and IP addresses are 'personal information'. It doesn't matter if a company has the most stringent privacy policy in the world - if you sign up for an email address, that's 'collecting personal information' and they have to comply with COPPA. Hell, if you hit a 404 page on a site and the webserver logs the error (which it invariably will), that's 'collecting personal information' because they logged your IP.
If the FCC thinks your site is 'directed to children under 13' or that you know people under 13 are using your site, you basically have to do all the COPPA stuff.
there is a troubling trend in that software is continued to be devaluated. First through the Open Source movement, then through introduction of relatively low priced App store models and free Ad based models and social networks. Companies which make their money purely from SW products (w/o adds) are finding it hard to convince people to pay a premium for their offerings and make compelling updated versions worthy of upgrade. Many are going to a forced subscription models like Adobe and Microsoft because of this upgrade issue. I'm not sure it will be successful based on the backlash I have observed from users. I fear that pure SW companies as we know it are in trouble.
Good. They deserve to be. This has been a long time coming. Software has no warranty whatsoever. No accountability by its publishers. The way consumers have been treated, charged, abandoned, etc, the industry has only itself to blame.
I'm not really talking about the little independent companies, though many of them are just as bad. It's software as an industry. The way it is handled overall. It's an abysmally bad business that has made untold billions of dollars by defrauding its own customers with broken product and providing no resolution but "buy the upgrade".
Is it any wonder that people have a hard time understanding software as licensed property? The people who deserve respect as developers are few and far between and have small dedicated customer bases. The rest is abusive capitalist greed of market, sell, abandon, sell again, repeat.
reading more about PDF changes between Mac OS X "print to PDF" generated version 1.3 and latest Adobe Pro generated version 1.7, looks like Mac "print to PDF" users are missing out on further encryption algorithm options, embedding JPEG2000, XML forms, 3D models, Javascript and Flash.
Not being able to embed 3D models, javascript, and Flash are no losses whatsoever. In fact, I consider the lack of JavaScript and Flash to be benefits, both in performance and security.
To be fair, if you are comparing reading a pdf file in Safari while downloading it from the web, to reading the same pdf file in Preview when it is already on your hard drive, there are going to be differences. To take the Internet out of the equation, try reading a pdf file that is on your computer by draging it into your Safari window. I think you will notice quite a difference in how smoothly it scrolls.
No the difference is pretty clear between Acrobat Reader outside a browser on my PC and the same document on my Mac in Preview. Acrobat Reader is bloated and slow. Preview ignores all the crap it can't handle and just gives you the basics. This is great until you need the extra crap for some reason.
seems to me we are witnessing that same sort of problem we saw with the progression of Adobe Flash. Wonder how much of this is due to Adobe's need to keep doing development on a product in order to force upgrades. I guess they simply can't figure out how to stop development on a product before it becomes a basket case from overdevelopment. The fact that we have a "Portable Document Format" keeps changing and generates incompatible documents unless you have the latest version, is sad. We are no better off then we were with incompatible Office document versions, IMHO.
We have a winner here!
Yes, the over engineering of Acrobat defeats its intended purpose. Adobe itself is killing it by compulsively needing to sell the same crap to the same people every year. This is one of the built in self destruct mechanisms of software as product in corporate America. Many products get to a robust and reliable state, only to be ruined by the corporate overseers demanding it continues to grow market share and sell more each year. This is a perfect example of how the myth of perpetual growth in capitalism turns into a dystopian disaster for consumers.
The problem is Microsoft keeps mucking around with office and changing the interface in ways that make it less useable.
Every time they bring out a new version you have to relearn how to do things because they have moved things or added a forth or fifth way of doing something which is incomparable with the first three ways. They are doing this to try and drive the upgrade cycle but it is a major reason why people are not upgrading and are staying with old versions. The subscription model is just another way of trying to keep the cash flow up. When you don't sell the hardware you get pushed into this sort of thing
Once again, why software as a capitalist venture in perpetual growth is doomed to fail. It's a very slow failure and it punishes the customers before it punishes the developer, but it does eventually punish the developer. Then they find new ways of forcing consumers to keep spending money every year by going to subscriptions.
These companies presented product that was at one time useful. Consumers bought into it and used it. The software was successful enough to become common in many/most use scenarios. But then the growth slows and the selling company demands changes be made to the product in order to re-sell it to all the same customers that already have it. This goes on until the changes become worse for the consumer and only serve the seller, as most development has degraded into change for the sake of change, reshuffling the deck chairs, ... essentially a carrot and stick to promote sales, not improve usability. Core product features that could be improved do not get development priority because they're not marketable. The product bloats and consumers as a mass start to recognize (usually far too late) that it's not in their interests any more to upgrade. And along comes the subscription scheme and marketing people to promote it at your company's IT department. Since everyone in IT fears losing their jobs to technology that actually works easily for average human being and doesn't require constant babysitting, they eat it up, being part of the problem, not the solution. It's like watching a union go from being a system of protecting workers to being a self-sustaining entity that only seeks to maintain itself as an organization: the mission has been lost.
Most office workers aren't actually using Microsoft Office
Article:
Quote:
70 percent of employees were only using the productivity software for viewing or light editing.
So nearly 3/4 employees still use Office in some capacity, nice clickbait / red herring title. That's like saying most people don't use a computer, because they only open Safari; well no, that's still false. Of course the vast majority aren't using most of the features in Office, that's hardly new, hell Microsoft admitted that 10 years ago themselves. That was their justification for changing the UI to the 'ribbon' thing, to get more features in front of 'average users'. Clearly that strategy hasn't worked and now there's other cheaper / easier solution players.
If you look per year on the source page you provided, you see that MacOS is increasing each year, while Windows is declining each year. It takes a long time before that growth starts to really accelerate. My guess it will take maybe 2-3 years before Mac is over 10%, and another 5-6 years before Mac is over 40%.
Microsoft is losing on marketshare on Desktop. It´s an declining business for them.
You know there q1 2014 figures out right? 73 million pc sold with 4 million being macs, so in the latest quarter mac accounts for 5.5%, which is less than what the source says. Moreover in msft lastest quarter, msft sold more windows liscnese y-oy. So do not be coy.
You can also combine PDF's into one PDF. I feature that I haven't found on the Mac without Acrobat Pro. Maybe I am wrong but that has been my experience.
Drag one PDF on top of the thumbnail in an open PDF in preview. It combines the two. I dropped Acrobat pro years ago.
This worked great in OSX 10.6. In 10.9 it fights me and behaves inconsistently.
Some of the posters here act like Adobe and Microsoft are the only SW vendors that "update" software to churn sales and FUD users.
dysamoria makes valid points but is clouded by anger.
The real problem is that software has become "fashion" driven. Not a viable concept for those trying to run a business.
At some point in the not too distant future, a major cloud repository is going to get hacked.
This will help kill outsourcing and vendor-clouding of user data.
Once again, why software as a capitalist venture in perpetual growth is doomed to fail. It's a very slow failure and it punishes the customers before it punishes the developer, but it does eventually punish the developer.
Sorry I think this rant is a bit extreme. The issue here is that it is just the product life cycle at work. Standard marketing theory - look it up.
It happens to every product. It is not punishing the developer - the developers just need to move on to something else that is needed. The problem is just that Microsoft/Adobe etc need to stop trying to get more and more milk out of the cow. As the cow gets older the returns decrease. Just accept that office/acrobat is no longer a growth item for the company, do the right thing by consumers and bug fix and make small useful improvements and keep making money. Think about calculators or for that matter the ipod. Explosive growth and improving features at the beginning but after a while people stopped trying to make improvements for improvements sake and they keep on making them and making modest amounts of money. Accept it and move on. Arguably this is also what is happening to the PC.
Google already reads my email. Why would I want them to read my spreadsheets and letters too? No thanks. It is either keep with MS Office for me or Apple's programs.
No the difference is pretty clear between Acrobat Reader outside a browser on my PC and the same document on my Mac in Preview. Acrobat Reader is bloated and slow. Preview ignores all the crap it can't handle and just gives you the basics. This is great until you need the extra crap for some reason.
I just did a careful scrolling comparison between Acrobat and Preview. Both using the most current versions on 2013 MBP running Mavericks. Preview may have a slightly smoother scrolling but so slight as to be almost imperceivable. I think the difference is due in part that Preview decelerates longer after a two finger swipe, where as Acrobat decelerates more quickly which makes it stop a little abruptly but the difference is very minute. One thing I definitely like better about Acrobat is the text search behavior. With Preview the results are linked in the side menu and you have to go clicking on them, where as Acrobat will jump to the next matched text every time you press enter, which is much more convenient when there are a lot of matches in a really long document such as the one I was testing. Just my personal preference. Preview is a pretty nice app. I just never use it because I changed my open with preferences to the respective Adobe CC apps by default.
For once I'm ashamed about Daniel's reporting. His one paragraph says it all--
Study a pitch for Google Apps
The company behind the study sells its app usage analytics to companies as a way to determine their actual needs for licensing Office, and it partners with resellers of Google Apps, which it recommends as an alternative.
--and is why I'm upset Daniel even wrote this sales pitch for Google Apps. I only use Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader when I absolutely have to (retired, used Office exclusively at work) but I'll never use anything from Google, especially anything that also uses their cloud storage because I just don't trust them. I'm surprised Daniel even considers using them with the things he writes about Google. Statistics can be skewed to show anything and this is a perfect case where it does.
If someone wants to use Google Apps, go ahead, I'm not stopping you but the results this company found aren't what I saw at work and I dislike Microsoft products as well.
I don't think this is a specific Microsoft problem... for years the heavy-lifting of business intelligence has been moving away from the desktop. Sure, some businesses still play with Excel, but I'm the last few companies I worked at, SQL was the language you needed to speak. Creating views or stored procedures that fed various reporting tools, or entire data warehouses tuned just for reporting... realtime and no chance for spreadsheet errors.
Now you can at various web-driven interfaces to the mix, but the data is still stacked up on a server somewhere... 99% of it in a relational database. The life of a database manager, or more specifically someone that can optimize large relational DB's is a good one.
Office 365 student pricing is amazing. It cost me £59.99 for a 4 year (2 device) licence. I have it activated on Windows and OS X on my one MacBook. It would cost me £109.99 just for a single licence version of Office:Mac.
I don't know about the UK, but Microsoft usually offers Windows Professional and Office Professional dirt cheap to students and staff at universities here in Australia. I got Windows 8 and Office 2013 for about $10 each as a qualifying staff member. I've seen Microsoft set up a stall at student orientation to sell to students too. So 60 pounds just to get Cloud syncing is a lot in comparison. I couldn't afford that if I was a student!
... realtime and no chance for spreadsheet errors.
The data has to come from somewhere and bad data can screw up a database just as easily as a bad formula can. Database managers are not immune from making mistakes either. Excel still has its uses, but your point is noted. I think a similar transition is happening with Word as almost all text communication these days is done with email. It just works better because it automatically creates a searchable index compared to printed Word documents or .docx stored on a server which are much more difficult to keep track of. But as others have noted Office is a suite which definitely has some useful features so companies will continue to license it in mass.
Comments
Hey, sh!t is sh!t ... .
There is a LOT of functionality in Acobat that isn't in Mac OS X's built in save to PDF. I don't use any of it personally. But I do observe my companion using it for her non-profit and related things. Mostly forms, and mostly filling them out, but also sometimes creating them. Also, using OCR to create text from imported document scans, so the content is indexable and searchable. Can't do that with the built-in Mac PDF writer.
I love having the basics of PDF included in Mac OS; they're really all I personally use. I don't exist in a corporate environment, so I don't know what the common uses are today. But there's WAY more in Acrobat than merely turning a document into a PDF. I always felt most of it was utterly irrelevant and bloated the program to the point of sluggishness... But some people use all that stuff. At least, someone better be using it, or Adobe needs to do a major feature culling.
I bet they're still using the older '09 version of iWork. This is why I found it appalling what they did to the suite with the new 2013 version. If their office people use Windows and Office, or even Macs and Office that would be a hugely embarrassing news story. Like when Microsoft was found to be running some of its servers on Linux.
Are the laws completely different in Canada than in the U.S. regarding kids' use of online services?
As far as I know, Google doesn't allow kids under 13 to use services like gmail and google docs due to federal COPPA laws. Because there is no option to use gmail, google docs, etc. without allowing them to create their world-famous, amazingly detailed psychological profiles of you as a user (product), they don't allow kids to use said services without parental sign off. Last time I checked that required more than checking a box on a web page, it was stuff like a photocopy of your passport or driver's license or sending them your credit card data.
It's nothing to do with 'world-famous, amazingly detailed psychological profiles' - according to the COPPA laws, even email addresses and IP addresses are 'personal information'. It doesn't matter if a company has the most stringent privacy policy in the world - if you sign up for an email address, that's 'collecting personal information' and they have to comply with COPPA. Hell, if you hit a 404 page on a site and the webserver logs the error (which it invariably will), that's 'collecting personal information' because they logged your IP.
If the FCC thinks your site is 'directed to children under 13' or that you know people under 13 are using your site, you basically have to do all the COPPA stuff.
http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus84-childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-six-step-compliance-plan-your-business
Good. They deserve to be. This has been a long time coming. Software has no warranty whatsoever. No accountability by its publishers. The way consumers have been treated, charged, abandoned, etc, the industry has only itself to blame.
I'm not really talking about the little independent companies, though many of them are just as bad. It's software as an industry. The way it is handled overall. It's an abysmally bad business that has made untold billions of dollars by defrauding its own customers with broken product and providing no resolution but "buy the upgrade".
Is it any wonder that people have a hard time understanding software as licensed property? The people who deserve respect as developers are few and far between and have small dedicated customer bases. The rest is abusive capitalist greed of market, sell, abandon, sell again, repeat.
Not being able to embed 3D models, javascript, and Flash are no losses whatsoever. In fact, I consider the lack of JavaScript and Flash to be benefits, both in performance and security.
No the difference is pretty clear between Acrobat Reader outside a browser on my PC and the same document on my Mac in Preview. Acrobat Reader is bloated and slow. Preview ignores all the crap it can't handle and just gives you the basics. This is great until you need the extra crap for some reason.
We have a winner here!
Yes, the over engineering of Acrobat defeats its intended purpose. Adobe itself is killing it by compulsively needing to sell the same crap to the same people every year. This is one of the built in self destruct mechanisms of software as product in corporate America. Many products get to a robust and reliable state, only to be ruined by the corporate overseers demanding it continues to grow market share and sell more each year. This is a perfect example of how the myth of perpetual growth in capitalism turns into a dystopian disaster for consumers.
Once again, why software as a capitalist venture in perpetual growth is doomed to fail. It's a very slow failure and it punishes the customers before it punishes the developer, but it does eventually punish the developer. Then they find new ways of forcing consumers to keep spending money every year by going to subscriptions.
These companies presented product that was at one time useful. Consumers bought into it and used it. The software was successful enough to become common in many/most use scenarios. But then the growth slows and the selling company demands changes be made to the product in order to re-sell it to all the same customers that already have it. This goes on until the changes become worse for the consumer and only serve the seller, as most development has degraded into change for the sake of change, reshuffling the deck chairs, ... essentially a carrot and stick to promote sales, not improve usability. Core product features that could be improved do not get development priority because they're not marketable. The product bloats and consumers as a mass start to recognize (usually far too late) that it's not in their interests any more to upgrade. And along comes the subscription scheme and marketing people to promote it at your company's IT department. Since everyone in IT fears losing their jobs to technology that actually works easily for average human being and doesn't require constant babysitting, they eat it up, being part of the problem, not the solution. It's like watching a union go from being a system of protecting workers to being a self-sustaining entity that only seeks to maintain itself as an organization: the mission has been lost.
Title:
Article:
So nearly 3/4 employees still use Office in some capacity, nice clickbait / red herring title. That's like saying most people don't use a computer, because they only open Safari; well no, that's still false. Of course the vast majority aren't using most of the features in Office, that's hardly new, hell Microsoft admitted that 10 years ago themselves. That was their justification for changing the UI to the 'ribbon' thing, to get more features in front of 'average users'. Clearly that strategy hasn't worked and now there's other cheaper / easier solution players.
You know there q1 2014 figures out right? 73 million pc sold with 4 million being macs, so in the latest quarter mac accounts for 5.5%, which is less than what the source says. Moreover in msft lastest quarter, msft sold more windows liscnese y-oy. So do not be coy.
This worked great in OSX 10.6. In 10.9 it fights me and behaves inconsistently.
Some of the posters here act like Adobe and Microsoft are the only SW vendors that "update" software to churn sales and FUD users.
dysamoria makes valid points but is clouded by anger.
The real problem is that software has become "fashion" driven. Not a viable concept for those trying to run a business.
At some point in the not too distant future, a major cloud repository is going to get hacked.
This will help kill outsourcing and vendor-clouding of user data.
http://youtu.be/mvsQjprz1x4
Sorry I think this rant is a bit extreme. The issue here is that it is just the product life cycle at work. Standard marketing theory - look it up.
It happens to every product. It is not punishing the developer - the developers just need to move on to something else that is needed. The problem is just that Microsoft/Adobe etc need to stop trying to get more and more milk out of the cow. As the cow gets older the returns decrease. Just accept that office/acrobat is no longer a growth item for the company, do the right thing by consumers and bug fix and make small useful improvements and keep making money. Think about calculators or for that matter the ipod. Explosive growth and improving features at the beginning but after a while people stopped trying to make improvements for improvements sake and they keep on making them and making modest amounts of money. Accept it and move on. Arguably this is also what is happening to the PC.
The trick is to grow old gracefully
Google already reads my email. Why would I want them to read my spreadsheets and letters too? No thanks. It is either keep with MS Office for me or Apple's programs.
I just did a careful scrolling comparison between Acrobat and Preview. Both using the most current versions on 2013 MBP running Mavericks. Preview may have a slightly smoother scrolling but so slight as to be almost imperceivable. I think the difference is due in part that Preview decelerates longer after a two finger swipe, where as Acrobat decelerates more quickly which makes it stop a little abruptly but the difference is very minute. One thing I definitely like better about Acrobat is the text search behavior. With Preview the results are linked in the side menu and you have to go clicking on them, where as Acrobat will jump to the next matched text every time you press enter, which is much more convenient when there are a lot of matches in a really long document such as the one I was testing. Just my personal preference. Preview is a pretty nice app. I just never use it because I changed my open with preferences to the respective Adobe CC apps by default.
For once I'm ashamed about Daniel's reporting. His one paragraph says it all--
Study a pitch for Google Apps
The company behind the study sells its app usage analytics to companies as a way to determine their actual needs for licensing Office, and it partners with resellers of Google Apps, which it recommends as an alternative.
--and is why I'm upset Daniel even wrote this sales pitch for Google Apps. I only use Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader when I absolutely have to (retired, used Office exclusively at work) but I'll never use anything from Google, especially anything that also uses their cloud storage because I just don't trust them. I'm surprised Daniel even considers using them with the things he writes about Google. Statistics can be skewed to show anything and this is a perfect case where it does.
If someone wants to use Google Apps, go ahead, I'm not stopping you but the results this company found aren't what I saw at work and I dislike Microsoft products as well.
Now you can at various web-driven interfaces to the mix, but the data is still stacked up on a server somewhere... 99% of it in a relational database. The life of a database manager, or more specifically someone that can optimize large relational DB's is a good one.
Office 365 student pricing is amazing. It cost me £59.99 for a 4 year (2 device) licence. I have it activated on Windows and OS X on my one MacBook. It would cost me £109.99 just for a single licence version of Office:Mac.
I don't know about the UK, but Microsoft usually offers Windows Professional and Office Professional dirt cheap to students and staff at universities here in Australia. I got Windows 8 and Office 2013 for about $10 each as a qualifying staff member. I've seen Microsoft set up a stall at student orientation to sell to students too. So 60 pounds just to get Cloud syncing is a lot in comparison. I couldn't afford that if I was a student!
... realtime and no chance for spreadsheet errors.
The data has to come from somewhere and bad data can screw up a database just as easily as a bad formula can. Database managers are not immune from making mistakes either. Excel still has its uses, but your point is noted. I think a similar transition is happening with Word as almost all text communication these days is done with email. It just works better because it automatically creates a searchable index compared to printed Word documents or .docx stored on a server which are much more difficult to keep track of. But as others have noted Office is a suite which definitely has some useful features so companies will continue to license it in mass.