Microsoft "delivers again" with Office 2013 says industry

End users and analysts satisfied with Microsoft's promises for new Office platform

There were positive responses from the IT industry in the aftermath of Microsoft's Office 2013 reveals in San Francisco this week.

Jason Spooner, director of technology for IT solutions firm Intelligence, responded positively to Office 2013's general interface.

"It's so clean," he said. "Every area's been improved. So even the process of adding a document or formatting it is just that little bit more efficient or simple."

The cloud-based nature of Sharepoint, said Spooner, will also alleviate past growing pains.

"We've grown up through various versions of Sharepoint, and certainly upgrading and moving between platforms has been challenging. But now it's cloud-based, you won't need to go through that upgrade pain again. You'll just consume it; it'll be more of an iterative process," remarked Spooner.

As a reseller of Microsoft software solutions, Spooner is hearing nothing but encouraging noises from clients who have sampled Office 2013's possibilities.

"There's a lot of interest in it from our customers," he said. "Many of our corporate customers never even took the move through Vista to Windows 7, so we've got a number of users who are on XP and older versions of Office, but they've been waiting for this because they're much more cloud aware, so it's not an on-premise installation."

Robert Bartelt, CTO at The Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, has viewed Office 2013 from a coder's viewpoint, and is enthused by the Sharepoint ecosystem and Apps for Office.

"I look at it and I say ‘What do I have to engineer, and what is Microsoft going to engineer for me?'. There's a lot that comes right off my plate. I just don't have to worry," Bartelt told Computing.

Bartelt described multi-version functionality on one app as "the holy grail for being able to do upgrades and the like".

"It really lets you concentrate on just running the business," he added.

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Microsoft "delivers again" with Office 2013 says industry

End users and analysts satisfied with Microsoft's promises for new Office platform

Jim Lundy, analyst and CEO of Aragon Research, said: "Once again, the Office team delivers. They delivered on innovation and I think they delivered on simplicity for doing business, particularly in the Sharepoint ecosystem; I think those are the two big takeaways."

Like Spooner, Lundy was enthusiastic about the interface – particularly the radial menu, though he has his concerns about consumer and enterprise pickup of touch hardware to support it.

"How it interfaces with the fingers looks very integral," Lundy told Computing. "But the question is how long it will take to get lots of touch devices out there, and you're probably into the back end of 2013, maybe 2014 for enterprise."

Lundy suggests that, in order to make its various innovations really fly in the business market, Microsoft will have to shift units at a consumer level to "push demand". However, he's dubious about the consumer appeal of the product.

On a pricepoint level – which Microsoft refused to be drawn on – Lundy feels Microsoft has such a potential success on its hands, it could name its own price for business IT users.

"If you could pay $48 for a dumbed down version of Office – which is basically what Google's got – or you pay $60, $100, $140, it starts to add up, so the question is what's the balance? Not everybody needs the turbo version. But also, does everybody need the upgrade at all?"

Lundy suggested that Microsoft would use the cloud-based nature of Office 2013 to try to get people on a subscription plan, but suggested such a CAL [Client Access Licence] model was not for everyone.

"They'll say, 'You need to go talk to your CFO, because you're not spending enough!'." said Lundy.

Overall, though, Lundy said the announcement "exceeded some our expectations", and though it appeared to be sidelining mobile and ARM-based processors, with no concrete reveals on Office features available for mobile, Lundy remained certain Office would maintain its position in the market.

"The cash cow, the king of the hill which is Office, delivered again," said Lundy. "And I think a lot of customers will breathe a sigh of relief."