![]() ![]() ![]() I am, in the meantime, certain we won’t ever see another standalone version of Office. I don’t know when Microsoft will finally switch over to a Chrome OS-style Windows, but I do know it’s coming. The next natural step from here is Windows as a service. And that’s what Microsoft thinks it has in Office 365. What you care about is delivering great services that will keep customers coming. Not only is that where its enterprise customers are now, but if you’re offering services instead of packages, you don’t care so much about having control of the bits. That’s one of the reasons why Microsoft has been embracing open-source software. Why? Because, looking ahead, Microsoft wants to cash in on services and not products. Heck, a Microsoft web developer told Mozilla’s developers on Twitter that they should throw in the towel on Firefox in favor of Chromium. It wants you to use archrival Google’s Chrome instead. The upshot: Microsoft no longer cares if you’re using Microsoft bits on your computer. And what are modern browsers? They’re Chrome-based browsers. And, even more amazing, Microsoft senior cybersecurity architect Chris Jackson actually blogged that Microsoft wants you to stop using IE and start using “modern” browsers instead. Second, Microsoft is cutting off support for Internet Explorer (IE) 10 years sooner than expected. It’s replacing Edge’s internals with Google’s open-source Chromium code. First, Microsoft gave up on developing its Edge web browser. You can see this in what might first look to you like two unrelated developments. It has a free version and a subscription version (£49.90 a year), but you can buy the full SoftMaker Office Professional 2018 for Mac, Windows or Linux for £89.99, after a 30-day free trial. COMING SOONIf you purchase Zorin OS 16 Pro now, you will also get the Pro Lite edition at no cost when its released in the coming months. Its built to run fast on old computers, but still includes Premium desktop layouts and the same creative suite and productivity apps as in Zorin OS Pro. And the money is in cloud-based services. Every purchase of Zorin OS Pro comes with a Lite edition. Microsoft is continuing to move its business model to where the money is. In Microsoft’s last quarter, Microsoft reported that its Office revenue increased 11%, which was driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 34%. Back in 2015, I pointed out that Microsoft made only 10% of its revenue from Windows sales. Instead, it wants you to rent a service from it forever and a day. Microsoft doesn’t want to sell you bits on a floppy, CD, DVD or download anymore. What does Microsoft’s marketing push against itself mean? It means that it is moving from being a product company to being a service company. In the software industry, a 16-year drought for killer apps was once inconceivable. What exactly can you add to an office suite these days, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, the last worthwhile “new capabilities” came with Office 2003. Outlook users will get not only native Apple Silicon support, but support for iCloud accounts as well, allowing them to sync their email, contacts, and calendars to the app if they use Apple’s service to store them.I’m sure the line of users wanting to sign up for those “new capabilities” is already forming. Office users who have automatic updates turned on should have the new versions sometime today, and anyone else can update it through the Mac App Store or Microsoft’s AutoUpdate software (depending on if you downloaded Office through the App Store or directly from Microsoft). As mentioned above, Microsoft Office suite and all of its apps Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive are now available at the Mac App Store. It seems like you’ll have to stick with the emulated version for now, if your team uses Teams. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s main communications competitor, Slack, has native support available in a public beta. Microsoft promises they’re working on that platform in their blog post, but the company hasn’t announced any sort of timeline. If you’re a heavy user of Teams, you may be disappointed to hear that it hasn’t been included in today’s rollout of updates. The updates are making the apps universal ones - meaning these versions will run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, so any upcoming updates or features will be coming at the same time for both platforms. The apps getting the updates are Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. If you’ve been using Microsoft Office on an M1 Mac, it’s about to get better - Microsoft is announcing an update today that brings native support for Apple’s new custom chip architecture to the Windows productivity suite. ![]()
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