undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnpunt7y ago0 comments

1. Go to Office365.com

2. Login

3. Do you want to stay logged in?

4. Is your information up to date?

5. Office / OneCloud homepage ("Good evening"). Press 'Install Office' (its a secondary/white button that blends into background, whereas 'New doc' is a blue button).

(20 URL redirects)

6. Installs page. Press 'Install Office' again.

7. Still Installs page, now with banner that says 'Your Office 365 subscription info has moved to account.microsoft.com. Now there's one place to manage all your subscriptions'. No download happens when you press 'Install Office'. No actual link to account.microsoft.com.

8. Go to account.microsoft.com. No download button.

I'm literally unable to download the Office dmg right now. Also, this is the improved interface. The prior one from last year was even less clear, except for the fact I could download it.

Most other apps have a 1-click download button on their homepage, and guide you through the login/reg process when you launch the app. Oh, that's right, Office ALSO does that, in addition to the aforementioned steps. It's braindead.

I think companies sometimes acknowledge that they've screwed up so badly that they need to rethink how they do things. Microsoft demonstrated willingness to do that since Satya became CEO and have shifted the entire company strategy away from Windows, killing a sacred cow. Whether or not that's what's going on behind the scenes here, the end user experience is severely improved going to App Store.

Regarding UIKit, yes the current Marzipan apps suck, all four of them. They're not mainline apps by any stretch of the imagination, and none were previously on the Mac. They'll get better. Just because Marzipan/UIKit today doesn't have good MacOS affordances doesn't mean it won't in the future, especially since it's not even being offered to developers right now. I don't see why it's difficult to see where the puck is going here. There's certainly some implementation details to work out, but it's better for the ecosystem as a whole - users, devs, and Apple - to have a single framework in the long run. Were you making something from scratch you certainly wouldn't make two frameworks.

To be specific, Apple has been against a 2-in-1 style product. I'm not advocating that, sorry to have caused confusion. I'm saying they'll have same underlying tech (UIKit/marizpan), but different end-user UX affordances based on mouse vs touch.

Remember that iPad is as large a market as Mac right now, and is moving upmarket and attracting more pro apps. There are also way more iOS devs than MacOS devs, 10:1 or 100:1. Devs making technical decisions about Apple ecosystem products right now should be getting the hint, and if they're not they likely will this June at WWDC. Apple doesn't tend to lurch around on product decisions, almost everything they do is a multi-year strategy executed in well-telegraphed steps.

0 comments

6 comments · 2 top-level

brianpgordon7y ago· 3 in thread

> Office365

There's your problem right there. Just buy a perpetual Office license. The awful Adobe-style subscription model for desktop software that barely ever changes is ridiculous.

zapzupnz7y ago

There are other aspects to Office 365 that are quite valuable to people, like a huge increase in the size of their OneDrive storage quotas, the ability to install Office on multiple devices rather than just one (which is pretty common; people install Office apps connected to their 365 accounts on their mobiles, tablets, etc.), Skype airtime, technical support beyond the first 60 days of purchase, and with certain plans you can share these benefits with a certain number of people.

Aside from that, many businesses with specific Office 365 packages get a number of licences (sometimes unlimited) to assign to staff; so people don't have to buy Office, they get it "free" from work and can install it on something like five or ten devices. Same goes for educational institutions; I'm a teacher, so all the staff AND the students get free access to Office 365, and all the complicated businessy things like Active Directory profiles, SharePoint, Teams (MS' answer to Slack), and so on is included with the same account that I use to install Office on my home Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

So for plenty of people, benefitting from the subscription service in this way, Office is free - no need to buy a perpetual licence.

It's not ridiculous. It might be for your use case, but you can't make a blanket statement that covers everybody.

brianpgordon7y ago

Well, maybe two different things have gotten conflated here. What I'm calling ridiculous is the fact that Microsoft is charging a subscription for Office. The flexibility to install on multiple devices is something that shouldn't be tied to a subscription license in the first place. And neither is more OneDrive space (why you'd want OneDrive space in the first place is a separate issue) or Skype airtime. It also doesn't make sense to me why you think it's a good thing that your Office account is the same as for AD and SharePoint and Teams... this is an offline desktop office suite - what does a Microsoft account have to do with it anyway?

I feel like Microsoft noticed how Adobe was making money hand over fist by moving Creative Suite to a subscription model and wanted in on the action. Of course everyone hates Adobe's awful subscription model, but it doesn't matter- if you have to have Photoshop then you're going to pay whatever they ask. But this is not a good thing.

Basically what I'm saying is that rushing to defend Microsoft's licensing model doesn't make any sense. This is a step back in every way from the world where you buy a license and don't have to keep paying the vendor month after month for them to do little more than refrain from shutting down access to software already on your computer. If you want Skype and OneDrive (again, why?) then fine, but the fact that that's bundled is not a good thing.

2 more replies

handzbagz7y ago

I rarely use Office products but I spend most of my day in some Office 365 product or another. There is a huge amount more to it than just Word.

zapzupnz7y ago· 1 in thread

> Just because Marzipan/UIKit today doesn't have good MacOS affordances doesn't mean it won't in the future, especially since it's not even being offered to developers right now. I don't see why it's difficult to see where the puck is going here.

It's not difficult to see where it's going. I just think people are believing it's going where they'd like to see it, where they think it's best for it to go; whereas Apple has their own ideas and always has. What we think is better for the ecosystem, they mightn't see it that way; what we see as the natural course of things, they might see as a passing fad.

Plus, we look at Microsoft's attempts at this very task with Windows 8 through 10. Seems to be a bit rough going. Apple famously accused Redmond of starting their photocopiers; I'm not sure Cupertino's Xeroxes are even close to warming up on this front.

Plus, it reads just a little too optimistic for me. We are already seeing that sharing user interface code between desktop and mobile results either in crippled experiences on both or each platform requiring its own platform-specific user interface code anyway. Instead of one amazing app on two platform, you get two crappy apps that feel like they belong on the other. In my mind, the poster child for this is Discord - it works well enough until you want to do some basic management, then the desktop version is pretty much mandatory.

If you're right about Marzipan having different UX affordances, I think Apple made a huge cock-up by demonstrating apps like Home. On a Mac, Home is an awful mess; the most basic operations are made unnecessarily difficult, what would be a long press or force touch now becomes an irritating secondary click (which is most annoying because I have a Force Touch trackpad not doing anything useful). Even the App Store is missing so many macOS features by virtue of being a Marzipan app.

I'm __hoping__ these are just examples of Apple eating their own dogfood, knowing it tastes terrible. But I'm just having terrible flashbacks to when Finder was a Carbon app and performed like a dog --- oh, that's where the dogfood analogy comes in, I guess!

That said, I still don't think Marzipan will be a convergence. I believe it's a stopgap. macOS is still the truck compared to iOS devices' cars; you just can't drive a truck using a car engine.

npuntOP7y ago

You're right to point out that I'm in the optimistic camp on this issue. I think it's both do-able over the course of several years of refinements, and necessary given that I think we're not done yet with innovation in interaction methods. We've been on a plateau for a while with iDevices and Macs. Meanwhile, foldable screens, touch surfaces replacing keyboards, and gaze tracking are on the horizon, and those will require some fundamental UX work to be done across both iOS and MacOS, making them even more similar than before. Those techs are <10yrs out, possibly much much sooner given we see incremental progress toward them with tech like Samsung's foldable phones, the TouchBar, and FaceID.

Even without new interaction methods, this kind of work is not an endeavor I think most companies can undertake, especially not Microsoft. Their failure doesn't reflect on the opportunity or possibility, because they really lack the deep bench of skill and company culture of perfectionism to get the UX right, and they don't have the market leverage or third party developer culture to push developers toward new things (see win32, uwp, etc). Win8 was a half-hearted springboard reskin that was only surface deep, and in no way a re-think of combining touch+mouse, let alone meaningful guidance and tools for developers on how to make apps span both. Users rightly rejected it and Win10 went back to a more incremental approach that's still mired in weird reskin issues, and touch is largely an afterthought on Windows except in specific apps.

Re: Mac App Store, it isn't actually a Marzipan app, though it shares some of the questionable UX choices. I'm particularly not fond of the full page modal with 'Done' button rather than the more traditional back/forward design. Totally agree with you on this and the Marzipan quality issues.

Discord is sort of representative of an aspect of the problem a combined UIKit is looking to solve - devs are using things like Electron to get cross-platform support but creating crappy anachronistic non-native experiences in the process. If devs can build for UIKit and get some platform-specific graceful enhancements built-in (as they did going from iPhone -> iPad), that changes the calculus on building with Electron or whatever.

There's a lot of implementation details regarding Marzipan and UIKit but - saying this as a designer who's had to do a fair share of mixed mobile-desktop work - I don't see any fundamental blockers to the approach that would prevent pro apps on the Mac getting their interaction density on mouse and touch apps getting their lower interaction density touch targets. Just a lot of work and decisions to make around how to progressively enhance and offer platform-specific flexibility. But that's just my take, I can see why others might disagree.

We'll see this June. Apparently some more fundamental UX changes were delayed last year to focus on quality, so this year is likely a big year.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse