How does MS Office 2013 look?

Note: Microsoft has announced it’s first losses in 26 years!

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MS Office 13

With the release of the latest MS Office 2013 into the market, Microsoft seemingly wants to give its product line a new lease of life and a lot more freshness in order to compete with the other tech players. The Office 13 intends to help users shift to more mobile computing devices like the MS Surface and the Windows 8 Phone.

And they’ve even gone cloud, ensuring that Office works for it’s users the way we’ve become used to working now. Remote access, large, secure storage and seamless integration between content and hardware. This Office suite is very mobile savvy and can be used on a tablet computer as well. There are many competitors in the market on different platforms such as InstallFree Nexus, Docs of DataViz to Go, services of Quickoffice, including Nivio and CloudOn delivering virtualized version’s that are fully loaded with office apps.

Microsoft is yet to divulge the cost of the Office 2013 experiment , but insiders point out that it’s bound to be pricy with combined services of the cloud on remote devices and the usual desktop installation. Subscription fees are bound to be steep in comparison to conventional desktop installation.

It is not very clear which mobile devices will be supported by Office 365 and Office 2013. To support iOS devices along with Android some make of Office Mobile would be engineered.

Yet it is highly unlikely that OS on Google in addition to Apple iOS will have the integration to run Office in its full version.

It is not very clear as promised by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, if Office 2013 could be executed smoothly on the tablet that is ARM based with Windows 8RT running on it( tablets with Windows 8 not based on x86 and x64 CPUs) like it performed with the tablet computer.

However Samsung’s tablet PC that are touch enabled and come with Windows 8 is perhaps the best way forward.

For cost reasons the cheap alternative with suites of limited productivity of mobiles like Quickoffice with Docs to Go( $15 for devices with Android and $20 for devices with iOS version), Apple pages that use apps like word processor designed gor iPad ($10), Nivio at $15 for could services that are virtualized are its toughest rivals that are single purpose.

Here’s a glimpse at how Office 2013 along with Office 365 are measuring up with the rest in the market.

Local Apps: Connections not required.

Apps that are locally installed have one main advantage over the alternatives that are cloud based, we don’t have to go online to work on them. Examples of such apps are Documents of Data Viz, Quickoffice. We don’t have a clue at the moment if products of Office for Android and iOS could run offline. All these suites offer support for PowerPoint, Excel and Word. With QuickOffice we can save and read PDF files.

Compatible on the Smartphone?

The apps of mobile productivity have a smooth run on the smartphone despite some connectivity glitches. It won’t be possible to use the touch and gesture enabled interface of apps of Office on iPhone and Droid.

So will the MS Office 2013 manage to do what Microsoft needs? Namely to turn the tide in devices in their favor?

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