After 20 years of the Office suite, the question for Office on Windows isn’t just how much more can you do with it – it’s how can you be more effective and more productive with Office? Office 2016 introduced a new look and new tools to help you find features. It makes collaborating and sharing documents and information much easier. It gives businesses more options for securing information, and gives Excel a real update for the first time in years. When Office 2016 first came out, there weren’t a great many major new features to go with that new direction. But since then, month by month, Microsoft has been adding extra features through monthly updates.
This shows clearly that the best way for many people to get Office is as a subscription service rather than software you pay for once (although that option is still there, even for macOS). There are still a confusing number of versions of Office. Personal includes the Windows or Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, Publisher and Access for Windows, plus 1TB of space and Skype credits. Office 365 Home is the same software, for a slightly higher monthly subscription, for five PC or Mac users. If you want to pay up front – and miss out on those new features as they come out – Office Home and Student 2016 has the basics: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for Windows. Office Home and Business 2016 adds Outlook and Office Professional 2016 adds Outlook, Publisher and Access.
The Office 365 subscriptions for businesses include the Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business services as well as the Office software. Office 365 Business includes the Windows or Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and now Access, and each person can put them on up to five PCs or Macs.
There are fewer differences between the home and business versions with Office 2016 – Excel’s business intelligence features are now in all versions. As usual, Visio and Project get new versions at the same time as Office, but you have to buy them separately. There’s a new Office 365 Visio service too – today that only lets you view Visio diagrams, so it’s handy for sharing but not (yet) for editing. And unlike the Windows 10-only Office Mobile apps (reviewed on the next page), Office 2016 runs on and as well. The bright new Office 2016 themes help you tell applications apart The universal look Microsoft calls Office 2016 more colourful – we’d call it the slightest bit chunkier as well. The default Colourful theme picks up the solid slabs of colour in Windows 10, painting them across the title bar and the tab bar on the ribbon so that you absolutely can’t miss that the window which is blue at the top is a Word document, and the windows that’s green at the top is your spreadsheet. If you prefer something more subtle, you can choose a white interface – with or without background images – or high-contrast dark grey or black themes.
But whether white, grey or brightly coloured, the title and ribbon tab bars in Office 2016 stand out just a little bit more because they’re not just more noticeable – they’re also just a little bit bigger. The compact view designed for mouse users takes up about a millimetre more space than the big and finger-friendly touch mode in, on a 1920 x 1080 resolution 13-inch screen with the ribbon expanded, and the 2016 touch mode ribbon and toolbar take up another couple of millimetres, eating away at the space you have for documents.
Getting bigger: even the mouse mode ribbon in Office 2016 takes up more space than the touch mode ribbon in Office 2013 One small change signals yet another piece of Microsoft’s ‘metro’ design language chipped away; the ribbon tabs are no longer in capitals. Working with files Many of the useful features in Office 2016 are in all the applications, like the improvements to the File menu. On the Info pane, you see more of the details about your file without having to click again to see all of the details, like the times when you created, last changed and last printed the file – they used to be hidden away.
One feature here exemplifies the good and bad of the monthly Office updates. For files you save to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, the list of recent files in each application roams between the devices where you sign in with the same Microsoft account (even if that’s not the account you bought Office with) so you can pick up where you left off on another PC very quickly. Recent and pinned files finally make it to the jump lists for the Office application in the Windows taskbar When Office 2016 came out, the list of recent files and folders showed up on the File menu in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for opening and saving files, handily grouped and labelled. Any files you pinned for convenience were in a Pinned group at the top, with others grouped under Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week and Older, making it much faster to find what you need or put new files in the right place. Plus each document is also marked with the file location, which can be another clue for picking between two similar file names. Documents you won’t open again can be removed, and you can copy the details of where the file is; just right-click.
All this was hugely useful, but early in 2016, Microsoft changed the Save pane, stripping out the list of recent folders and dramatically slowing down the whole dialog (in a large folder, Word would often hang while it scanned the folder to find all the files already saved there). It also stopped creating file names automatically from the first line of the document in Word – or at least showing you what the file name would be. The changes were frustrating and unpopular. One update improved the performance, although some users still find it slow.
And another upcoming update brings back the recent list, and actually makes it better. When you’re opening files, you can switch between a list of recent files and a list of recent folders, and the Save dialog goes back to showing folders sorted by how recently you’ve used them. This also, finally, brings Office users on Windows a similar level of OneDrive integration that Mac users have had since Office 2016 came out, adding a Shared with Me tab to the Open pane. This only shows files – the Mac version shows folders as well – and the list isn’t always up to date. But if the file you need does show up, that saves you a tedious hunt through old emails or the OneDrive website to find what you’re supposed to be working on. And if you want to create a new document in a folder someone has shared with you – which is easy to do on the Mac – you have to save it somewhere on your own PC and then upload it to the OneDrive folder in your browser.
The only way to get around this is to use and to sync all the folders that are shared with you, which can put a lot of files you don’t need on your PC just to let you save files into the folder yourself. It’s a shame Office for Windows doesn’t get all of the same elegant OneDrive integration as macOS. However, Windows 10 users who are still missing placeholders in OneDrive get some consolation. As long as you’re online, you can navigate through all your OneDrive folders to open or save files in existing folders, whether you’re syncing them to your PC or not. It’s good that this extremely useful feature is coming back with improvements, some ten months after it vanished. But it’s worrying that something so useful in something as important as the File dialog went away without any notice in the first place, and annoying that the Office team didn’t respond to any of the UserVoice requests to get the feature back (they also declined to explain the changes to us for this review). It’s also annoying that there are still Office settings that don’t roam – your custom dictionary does, but your spell checking settings (like whether to ignore words with numbers in), your AutoCorrect dictionary and your Outlook email signatures don’t, for example.
One change will be useful for documents you’re opening from the cloud: if you open a file with large charts or SmartArt diagrams, you usually have to wait for the whole thing to load. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2016, if you’re opening a document on a slow network, you get a placeholder so you can work with the rest of the document while the objects load (they’re the correct size so the document won’t reflow when the download finishes, too). The download progress indicator in the status bar lets you know more clearly how long you’ll be waiting for the rest of your document to appear, which is also helpful. You can see who is editing your document and get back to earlier versions Co-working chops You might get more OneDrive links from colleagues now that there’s a Share button in the ribbon in Word, PowerPoint and Excel – this opens a Share pane that defaults to emailing the link to your document, but you can click to get a link you can copy (if you use Slack or Twitter to reach people, for example).
It’s always your choice whether people can just see the document or make changes too. Being able to see who you’ve shared the document with so clearly in the Share pane is a useful reminder, and it’s also a handy way to reach them, as you can email, send an IM or start a Skype for Business chat with them from here.
As long as it’s saved in OneDrive (or SharePoint), multiple people can edit a shared Word document or PowerPoint presentation, at the same time, using Office 2016 – and Office Online. You get a notification when someone opens or closes a document you’re working on, and you can open the Activity pane to see who has been working on the file recently (use the icon that looks like a clock next to the Share icon). This is also in Excel and it’s a quick way to get a previous version of your file.
It’s much simpler than using the Manage Document list on the File menu. Word and PowerPoint also have an icon in the top-right to show any comments that people have left in the file. In Word, a flag in the text shows you where your co-writer is editing. It turns red when they’re making changes and the paragraph is locked – to avoid the kind of arguments that are likely if someone changes the phrase you’re still in the middle of finishing. You don’t have to wait until they save the document to see their changes, and edits appear almost instantly (depending on how fast your network connection is). As in Word 2013, you can also right-click on a paragraph and choose Block Authors to stop anyone else editing it, even if you’re working elsewhere in the document, and that’s visibly marked so other people don’t get frustrated when they can’t change it. In PowerPoint, you see the icon of a person on the slide list and on the object they’re editing – hover over it to see their name.
Again, you can see activity and comments quickly. PowerPoint also finally gets an easy way to compare the changes that other people have made to a presentation; you can see the slides side-by-side and pick which changes to save.
Excel doesn’t yet have live co-editing. You can work on the same spreadsheet as a colleague if you both use Excel Online, so we still expect this to come to the Windows version in time.
Protecting documents The downside of making it easy to share documents is people sharing things you want kept private. On Windows, Office has had the option of limiting what people can do with the documents you share with them, and even the emails you send, for years. As long as you have Rights Management Services on Windows Server or the new Azure Rights Management Service, you can turn on Information Rights Management and choose whether a document can be copied, printed, forwarded or not, and stop it being opened after a specified expiry date. And you can read protected documents directly in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and (new in 2016) Visio, without needing a separate app. This is a feature that is getting more interesting now that people can also open those documents on iPhones, iPads, Macs and Android devices, and read IRM-protected email in, iOS and Android, as well as Outlook Web Access and the free RMS apps.
Office 2016 also extends the Outlook Data Loss Prevention features right into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Previously, if you tried to email out information that might be confidential or against regulations, you’d see a mail tip in Outlook – if your administrators had turned on DLP rules in Exchange like not letting you send credit card numbers. Now you’ll see a warning right inside the app, say, if you try to save a document with information you’re not supposed to share in the wrong location. As with the Outlook mail tips, you get a warning at the top of your document stating that you shouldn’t be doing that, but you also have the option of doing it anyway and providing a reason why you need to. Microsoft calls this the ‘break the glass’ option. In other words, this allows you to get out in an emergency, but you set off an alarm by doing so – because your manager will get a message that you’re bypassing the rules along with your explanation, and they can choose whether the message gets sent.
That lets you set up rules to protect data but give people a say in when they’re applied, because information security is really a management rather than a technology issue. After all, if you really want to pass on information you’re not supposed to, you can pull out a phone and take pictures of your screen to share; you just can’t pretend that you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong. Looking it up In all the Office programs except OneNote and Publisher, the ribbon also includes the new Tell me feature.
Despite the ribbon, there are still plenty of tools hidden away in dialog boxes – and even the tools on the ribbon may not be where you expect. Tell me gives you a search box where you can type what you want to do (adjust line spacing, print, and so on) and get a mini menu of tools that match what you’re asking for. It’s quite smart when it comes to working out what you’re looking for, so you don’t have to type the exact name of the command. Ignore the inevitable comparisons to Clippy – there’s nothing proactive about this, it’s just a handy way to help you find the feature you need. Excel has the new Tell me menu to help you find commands Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel have another tool for looking up information, and like Tell Me it’s borrowed from the Office online apps. Select a word and choose Smart Lookup from the context menu to get a pane of search results, images, Wikipedia info and dictionary definitions.
This is a much more useful version of the Define and Search with Bing commands that it replaces, because you get all the information in the same place – previously, you could see the dictionary definition inside your document, but the search results opened in your browser. Oddly though, you don’t get this feature in OneNote, which still has the elderly Look Up feature from Office 2010, with a much more fiddly interface. Researcher finds useful facts and images – and some very irrelevant ones too Word As well as the new features common across Office 2016, the monthly updates have been adding extra features to Word 2016. You can insert (and edit) SVG images. Researcher joins Smart Lookup as a way to get information for your document: Smart Lookup gives you background information about a selected word, while Researcher lets you search for topics and shows a pane of relevant statistics, quotes, images and sources. However, the results Researcher produced weren’t always accurate, and it repeatedly crashed our test PCs.
A new feature called Editor improves the spellcheck context menu and adds back the grammar checking that Microsoft originally dropped from Word 2016 – and more usefully, it explains why the suggestions are being made. It’s a cloud service so the word list will stay up to date (adding new words like Uber and Lyft, for example). But our favourite addition is the Ink Editor.
You’ve been able to write, highlight and draw with a pen in Word for a long time, and it recently got shape recognition, turning your squiggles into neat circles and squares. And now you can use a pen – or touch – to edit your document (as long as you’ve got a recent version of Windows 10). Scribble over a paragraph or draw a line through a word and it’s deleted; circle some text with your finger or your pen and it gets selected.
Switch to the highlighter pen and when you draw over a line of text, the messy stroke turns into a neat highlight. If you then decide you don’t want it – just drag the highlighter over the text again. This is both fun and very efficient when you’re reviewing documents the way you would with a pen and paper, making Word much more useful on the tablets and convertible PCs that are making up most of PC sales these days. Get suggestions for how to lay out your slides PowerPoint PowerPoint has also been adding new features in the monthly updates to go with Smart Lookup and the same ink equation editor that’s in Word, plus six of the new Excel chart types. The new Designer tool suggests layouts for slides with images, or smart art that you can use to make bulleted lists more interesting. The digital ruler for drawing lines with a pen and touch, or lining up objects, feels both fresh and useful.
Zoom makes it easy to create summary slides for presentations when you want to have a discussion rather than a slide-by-slide presentation – or to create a slide deck that’s easy for people to explore on their own. You can use it to create one slide with nice big buttons to jump to specific slides, or it can act like a table of contents for a presentation that’s organised into sections. Or you could use the new Ink Replay to draw notes and diagrams that you can rewind and fast forward through as a more interesting way of showing information. And you can record a slideshow complete with a voiceover, ink annotations and even the on-screen laser pointer, for rehearsal or to share with people. There’s a new Morph transition that lets you pick an object or some text that’s common to the two slides you want to move between, and it implements an animation that looks very professional. That’s a great way of zooming in on one piece of information or going from a list with information to a more visual layout, so, for example, you can flip from a list of the solar system’s planets to a diagram that shows how much bigger Jupiter is – and Morph makes it look like the planets are zooming into their orbits.
This is less like creating a slideshow and more like creating an animated interface. It’s the kind of feature you’d expect in Keynote on the Mac, and getting it in PowerPoint makes the app feel like it’s becoming a much more modern tool. Filling in tools that PowerPoint has needed for a long time also helps – finally, a text highlighter has been added. Outlook shows a list of files you’ve been editing ready to send in a new mail Outlook Outlook 2016 adds one superbly useful new feature: the list of recent files that pops up when you click to add an attachment. After all, the file you’re most likely to want to send is probably the one you’ve just been working on. This might get confusing, though. If the file is on OneDrive, Outlook assumes you only want to send a link to it rather than the actual file – so the recipient has to be online to download the file itself (you can select the attachment and change that each time, but you have to remember to do that).
We like the way a recent update added thumbnails for images you attach to a message, so you don’t have to open them if you suddenly start worrying that you may have chosen the wrong file. If you have a touchscreen, you can get the same list of recent files when you’re replying to a message from the action bar at the side of the screen, which is now context-sensitive. Instead of greying out the tools that you can’t use when you’re replying to a message, the new action bar replaces them with common options – attaching a file, popping out or discarding the message, or marking it as ‘important’.
Just remember, you have to sacrifice more screen space to see the touch tools than in Office 2013. We also like the responsive design that fits Outlook into smaller windows better. Instead of shrinking down all the panes you have displayed so you can’t really see any of them, Outlook automatically switches to showing just the inbox list or just the message pane as you resize the window, depending on what you have selected. That works especially well on smaller tablets. The tools for working with files you receive are easier to find as well Also useful on smaller tablets is the option to save less of your inbox on the device. In Outlook 2013, the default is to download the last months’ worth of email and you can’t choose anything less than that.
In Outlook 2016, you can keep two weeks, one week or just three days of messages to save space. The slightly faster search of mail you’re keeping on Exchange comes in useful if you do that, as does the better performance on slow networks (Outlook should freeze less while it’s trying to stay connected to the server on a poor network connection). Outlook has a range of tools for working with Groups, but conversations look just like mail Office 365 enterprise users see the new Office 365 Groups in Outlook, which gives you a quick way to get to the group messages and group calendar. You can create groups and add members from Outlook, instead of having to go to the Office 365 portal – although the icons for files and the OneNote notebook take you to the portal rather than opening in Outlook as lists.
Microsoft is keeping Outlook up to date with its new services – the MyAnalytics feature of Delve also shows up in Outlook to help you see what documents you have in common with your email correspondents. Six new chart types in Excel finally give you some new ways to show data Excel Excel 2016 gets the widest range of new features in Office 2016. As well as all of the new interface features, Excel does some long overdue catching up, and it’s been getting more new features in the monthly updates since Microsoft launched its productivity suite. That includes the first new charts in Excel in years, with treemaps, sunbursts and the waterfall chart for showing how positive and negative figures match up, as well as funnel charts.
There’s a new forecasting option that makes it easier to create forecasts that aren’t just linear – you can choose the confidence level you want to see, or put multiple forecasts in the graph (so you can view the most pessimistic and optimistic forecasts side-by-side). But it’s also about little things like photos having the correct orientation when you insert them. Excel 2016 finally makes more sense of the various business intelligence and data analysis options Microsoft offers.
In the past, these were only in the Pro versions of Office, plus you had to specifically enable them, and while they were certainly useful, they were also complex and didn’t integrate well. Now you get at least the basics, even in the Home version of Excel 2016, although the business versions can connect to a lot more data sources, and more of the tools are built in. There are fewer differences between Office 2016 versions, but the business versions of Excel have far more connections for importing data The Power Query tool for getting data into Excel so you can work with it is the New Query feature on the Data tab, although it still opens a new window for you to choose how to arrange the data you’re importing. Power Map becomes the 3D Maps option on Insert tab. It still opens in its own window and you have to enable it the first time you use the feature, but that turns on all the data analysis tools at once – which is at least an improvement over adding them one by one. Confusingly, that makes adding a map the easiest way to enable Power Pivot. Power Pivot is also better integrated – instead of another separate tool to work with, it becomes the standard way to work with a PivotTable that uses the faster Excel engine to utilise data from multiple sources – so you don’t need to think if you’re using a traditional PivotTable or a data model PivotTable, you just get more powerful tools if you’re using the data model.
There’s still a separate window for managing the data model of your spreadsheet but you can create measures and KPIs to track directly in the PivotTable, and you can rename tables and columns directly. You can also search for the field you want rather than scrolling through the list. Excel also does much more of the work for you, offering to automatically build relationships between multiple tables, and automatically finding times and dates, and using them to group the data. Working with the slicers that let you quickly filter tables and PivotTables using a touchscreen gets easier too. In Excel 2013 you could only select one item in a slicer using touch – now you can press and hold to get a control that switches you into multi-select mode, although it would be easier if you could just tap on multiple items all the time to select them one after another. Excel 2016 makes it easier to create and analyse PivotTables Power View – which relied on Silverlight, limiting where it was useful – is still in Excel 2016, but it’s turned off by default. If you want to use it you can customise the ribbon to add it back and then enable the features.
Or you can leave it off and switch to using the free, open source Power BI Desktop app that Microsoft is developing instead. This can import Power View reports and has many more visualisation tools – it’s getting regular updates, which Power View isn’t, and you don’t need to use the Power BI service to use Power BI Desktop. (If you do, however, you can publish data models directly to Power BI to work with them there). This rationalisation of the Excel data analysis tools makes a lot more sense than the grab bag of add-ons for previous versions, and it’s a good sign for the future of the app. The monthly updates have mostly been small but welcome improvements, like more data connectors, better tools for importing and transforming data, keeping layouts when you refresh queries – and some handy new functions making conditional functions easier to work with.
Fewer changes elsewhere The OneNote team have been concentrating their efforts on the Mac and mobile clients, and on tools to make OneNote more useful in schools. Apart from the new interface, OneNote 2016 started out with just one new feature. The Send to OneNote tools in the notification tray used to be a mini toolbar – then it became an icon which allows the user to choose whether clicking opens OneNote, starts a screen clipping, or creates a new note in the Quick Notes section of the default notebook (shown in a tiny window with no interface).
This is the way quick notes used to work several versions ago, which suggests Microsoft is listening to feedback, but it’s an odd choice for the only new feature to be introduced with OneNote, when many parts of the app are still several versions behind the rest of Office. And the only extra OneNote 2016 has seen in the first year of monthly updates?
Letting you insert online videos into your notes. OneNote’s toolbar icon opens a quick note by default Publisher gets nothing but the new Office themes and the colourful title bar; it has no new features at all. Even Access 2016 gets some minor updates as well as the Tell Me tool for finding features (oddly, though, you can’t use it when you’re designing web apps) – though they’re improvements to existing features rather than anything significantly new. You can easily export a list of all the data sources your database uses to Excel from the Linked Table Manager, and the Show Table dialog is larger so you don’t have to scroll as much. Project also has the Tell Me search, and gets a new timeline view that shows multiple timeline bars together – you can also show just specific phases of a project in the timeline bar by picking the date range.
Visio users will find one small change a huge time saver: a lot of diagrams are based on data in Excel and setting up that connection has always been tedious, but the new Quick Import tool on the Data tab is much easier to use. The monthly updates have also added a better UML support and catalogue of third-party templates and sample diagrams. You can also use rights management to control who can see your documents. These are small changes but useful ones. The OneDrive integration in Office 2016 is better than you get with Windows 10, but not as good as in Office for Mac Final verdict When software is as powerful, mature and as complex as Office is on Windows, making it easier to use can be as important as adding more features.
That’s the trade-off Microsoft has made with Office since the ribbon interface was first introduced. The Tell Me feature is a big help here, although it does show you quite how many features could do with a refresh – Tell Me makes it easy to find the Rules editor in Outlook but does nothing to fix the problem that it’s still in a tiny window you can’t resize. But there are useful new features in Office 2016, with more arriving in the monthly updates, and many, many improvements to existing features. The sharing and co-authoring tools continue to get easier to use and more powerful, although it’s disappointing that Windows users don’t get the superb OneDrive integration that’s on the Mac, where you can see files that have been shared with you by other people – saving a huge amount of time when you’re collaborating.
Excel has finally been graced with some new chart types, and the data analysis tools like maps are built in, and available in all versions, instead of being expensive and complicated extras. The ink and touch improvements have been adding up. Being able to scribble or swipe over text in Word is a very natural way of working on a tablet with a pen. We also like the context-sensitive touch shortcuts in Outlook, the multi-select mode for PivotTables in Excel, and being able to write maths equations with your finger, or a pen, and have them converted to text, in PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of the extra Office tools that light up with the Surface Studio and Dial, but being able to put 3D models into Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be useful for a lot of people. These kind of updates make subscribing to Office rather than buying it once far more valuable than the free space you get on OneDrive.
You might pay for a new version of Outlook just to make it faster to attach recent files to an email; it’s a tiny feature that’s enormously useful because it saves so much time. But you probably wouldn’t buy a new version of Word just to get live co-authoring or the Smart Lookup feature. Now you get those, and more new tools every month; make sure you sign up as an Office Insider to get them all. Of course, those updates can also remove features – the changes to the Save As options have taken far too long to get fixed.
They can also be less stable than you might like: Researcher was prone to crashing Word and for a couple of months a number of users found that OneNote was running out of memory and crashing several times a day. A Windows bug that causes Word documents to jump around when using a touchscreen has also taken some time to get fixed. But overall, the monthly updates are working well. Month after month, Office 2016 is getting better and more useful. On top of the regular updates to the desktop apps, some of the features that Microsoft might once have jammed into existing products as options, instead show up in entirely new apps. You can get Sway without paying for Office – but if you have Office 365, the images and documents you can put into the web-like presentations Sway creates can come from Office 365 sources like OneDrive for Business and OneNote, as well as YouTube and Facebook.
The Delve service on Office 365 is a great way of showing you information created by people you collaborate with, and it continues to evolve – information can now come from Yammer as well as email, OneDrive for Business and Office 365 videos, along with Office 365 Groups. Tools like this, Office Groups and Microsoft Teams are a sign that Microsoft doesn’t think the appeal of Office is limited to the familiar desktop apps – even though those keep evolving and improving too.
DRM is NOT inherintly evil. There could be MANY business uses for DRM in Office. Companies produce reams of documents that they'd love to have a way of restricting access to (and yes I know, if someone REALLY wanted to re-distribute a document, they could always print screen, yada, yada).
Heck look at Apple's recent pulling of Safari betas. Imagine if they had a way of applying DRM to the beta so that only those who are authorized could run it. That's not an evil use right? How about bank statements that could only be opened by the account holder. How about digitally signed documents that only your lawyer could open and he could only file, not make copies of?
How about newsletters that can 'only' be opened by subscribers. There are MANY quite legitimate uses for drm that ANY user can apply. After all if you don't like it, then don't produce any documents that have it and don't accept any documents that have it, right? It's fine if DRM doesn't fit into your world view, but to claim that it's some bs JUST because it's being lofted by M$ is having a very narrow view of the world.reasons and of course for helping their customers.
Like their built-in Internet Explorer, MP3, Windows Media Content, Java, HTML, etc. Incompatibilities and of course not patching their 'old' SERIOUS OSes because they 'cannot' or because they care about their customers. Answer this: Does anyone honestly believe that M$ want this IRM thing to protect their customers or to lock them in their products cycle?
Methinks EASILY that they go for another future lock-in. To me this is not different than the copy-protected CDs and DVDs which are truly other ways to control your customers and not to help them. Instead of punish your customers, educate them Mr. Gates but then again you, yourself are uneducated about RPRM (Real Peoples Rights Management).
Oh, and in another news report from M$ Monopoly: Am I the only one who sees this M$ truly to become the one and only Evil Empire? Oh, I keep forgetting that they are doing this for our own good like Mr. Bush and Blair are doing now for Iraq's people. Until Apple keeps us free from M$ BS I would be more than happy to support them. The same with Linux and other truly freedom OSes out there. Dark Side sax.
Does this mean that any new feature that M$ introduces is only designed to 'lock them in'? You are missing the whole point. Their office suite ALLOWS YOU to place DRM restricitions on documents YOU produce. This is NOTHING like copy protection, it's not designed for ISV's, it's designed for US. If you don't need the feature, fine, don't use it, but don't presume to speak for 'the rest of us' who actually might have a need to use something like it. Can we drop the whole 'evil empire' stuff, PLEASE. There other threads on this board about Apple 'screwing' their independant retailers.
People whine about Apple crushing the clone market. If Apple owned 90%+ of the OS market everyone would be saying the same junk about them. Not that M$ doesn't do some crappy stuff (and produce some crappy stuff), but please proffer some intelligent reasons, and not drag out this M$ is evil, anything M$ does is to further their own cause, yadda, yadda. You can replace M$ in this last sentence with just about any company. DRM in the proper context IS useful, like it or not. Originally posted by binaryDigit Does this mean that any new feature that M$ introduces is only designed to 'lock them in'?
You are missing the whole point. Their office suite ALLOWS YOU to place DRM restricitions on documents YOU produce. This is NOTHING like copy protection, it's not designed for ISV's, it's designed for US. If you don't need the feature, fine, don't use it, but don't presume to speak for 'the rest of us' who actually might have a need to use something like it. Can we drop the whole 'evil empire' stuff, PLEASE.
There other threads on this board about Apple 'screwing' their independant retailers. People whine about Apple crushing the clone market. If Apple owned 90%+ of the OS market everyone would be saying the same junk about them. Not that M$ doesn't do some crappy stuff (and produce some crappy stuff), but please proffer some intelligent reasons, and not drag out this M$ is evil, anything M$ does is to further their own cause, yadda, yadda.
You can replace M$ in this last sentence with just about any company. DRM in the proper context IS useful, like it or not. You know what?
You can say whatever you like about M$ but that doesn't change the fact that with every product they release they go ahead and 'disable' their previous ones. That's why years after years people keep buying those Office and Windows products even if they don't actually use/need them but because they have that new feature which other people/companies may actually use thus they HAVE TO HAVE the new versiona. If this isn't lock in what is? And YES M$ is evil at its best.
And YES I think that sometimes Apple is a puppet of M$. Let me ask you this: If they were actually a nice bunch of people how come and they never: Open Source anything? Lower their prices? Try to be more backward compatible? Support other platforms the same way with their own Windows?
Try to improve their products even after they win their opponents? Support other hardware platforms than just Intel/AMD? Mess less with others standards? Do this and that?
And don't give me that if Apple or this and that company would be in the same position they would do the same thing! Or that they don't have the resources!
Or that they are company and if they do this and that they will not earn that much! Big freaking deal! Right now M$ is in that position and they act evil and they have no excuse because out there, others offer loads more with NO money at all.
And even if other companies are acting evil (Apple for example) they should show them otherwise! You aren't fighting evil by doing evil, you only raise the bar of evil! And for that M$ have no equal right now. As for DRM we all know that there is no secure digital system that cannot be broken even by an individual!!! This DRM isn't a system to protect anything! Is another lock-in from M$. And if you feel otherwise let me remind you of XP infamous Activation method, DVDs, Copy-Protected CDs, Firewalls, 'insert ANY protection system here', which in everyday computer life it gets broken with the speed of light.
Before even companies give to the market that locked product! The worst part of M$ being just evil, is that people actually think that M$ cares for them by offering them great technology whereareas it is actually another way to succeed M$ moto: Each house and office with a PC running Windows only! And they fell for it! Also, if you think that M$ isn't evil how come during their big trial some 'nice' notes got out? Or how they feel about their big enemy now, Linux, which if they were able they would pay people not to use it! Gimme a break! M$ is PURE evil and they actually like it this way because it pays them best!
Oh, and yes Intel are evil too! It takes two to tango the::evil:: way! Do you have a lock on your door (car or home)? Do you use it? You do know that anyone with the right motivation can break into your house despite the locks, right? Do you brush your teeth, even people who brush their teeth religously get cavities. You miss the point, the point is to provide a system to make it MORE secure, not an impossible attempt to make it ABSOLUTELY secure.
Plus there is an entire legal aspect. If the act of breaking the copyright involves the use of an explicit program whose only (or primary) purpose is the cracking of the documents DRM protections, then it is obvious that that is your intention. You can't say, 'oh I didn't know I wasn't supposed to forward this on to everybody', since the only way you could have done so was to explicitly run an app to defeat this protection. In the business world, this is important when it's time to sick the legal dogs on them.
Ahhh, thank you for bringing this up as this will be a good way to finish this whole thread off (at least as far as I'm concerned). I NEVER said that M$ wasn't 'evil'. You would be hard pressed to find ANYONE who dislikes M$ more than me. HOWEVER, the reasons I have are based on something more than a simple belief (M$ BAD) or these notions of their actions that are either not real, or not any different than anyone else. I've been in this industry for a long time and have seen M$ go from this dinky little outfit in rainy Washington to what they are now and have had years of actual observation and context to get to the opinion I have now (which has nothing to do with 'evil', but more to do with 'advancing the market'). Your reasons for sticking this 'evil' label are misguided and hold very little water.
It's funny now this whole 'your either for us, or against us' attitude permeates. Just because I didn't accept your arguments, you automatically assumed that I was some M$ worshipper. It was your ARGUMENTS that I didn't accept. If you go back and read everything I've posted (both here and on the thread about Intel) I NEVER make any statements that apply a label of good or bad about either company (as a whole).
You come up with these statements, I disagree with the statements and I tell you why, hopefully with facts and information to back me up. I try not to put out blanket statements that can not be verified or are based purely on baseless opinion.
Simple as that. You obviously have your mind in the camp you like to be in. You are of course free to have your opinions, I merely ask that if you profer some evidence to support that opinion, that this evidence be factual and provable and sensible in the proper context. Originally posted by binaryDigit What? How on earth do they do that? There are still a ton of people out there using Office 4.2.
Do you actually have any examples of this behaviour? Heck, I ran IE 4.0 on my machine at home (Win2K, I use Mozilla so I never bothered to upgrade, BUT I still kept IE around for that occasional website that just wouldn't act correctly) until just this last xmas. You mean that you didn't know that they do not support both in software and hardware Win9x and NT products? For a company of such scale they should have, you know! Especially for a nice company as M$.
Wait, are we talking about M$ being evil or users being dumb. If people insist on upgrading to 'have the latest and greatest' how on earth is this M$'s fault and how is it any different than ANYONE else? It is not always of having the latest and the greatest except if that's a base opinion to built up in order to call M$ customers dumb. It is the case of not being able to open Office 2000 docs in Office 97 and not just vise versa. Or Upgrade your NT network without rebuilding its structure from the beginning in order to 'upgrade' to Windows 2003 Server. TONS of companies don't open source there code, to say that this is a stretch would be granting it too much leeway. Actually, TONS of companies open their Source Code.
Only the Capitalistic ones like Adobe, Apple (although Apple gives something back), M$, et al aren't. Oh, you mean like Apple lowered theirs for iLife. Like how Apple lowered theirs for Jaguar? How much cheaper is Photoshop now than 5 years ago? Actually, Apple gives away their products if you ask me.$50 ONLY for iLife!?!?!?!
-$130 for an OS that is if not better than XP PRO is close in features and capabilities? AND it comes preinstalled in ALL new Macs for FREE!???
-$200 for OS X 5-pack for families!?! A steal by all means. How much would you pay for 5 family computers even for XP Home? I didn't hear ya.
Can you repeat? -$1000 for OS X Server Unlimited license? That's not even a steal! The only thing that can compete this is for a company to give you this for free.
Then again can you tell me the price for Windows 2000(or 03) Server for 100 users? I can't hear you now. AND you get this for free when you buy a XServe! AWESOME pricing and I hope that others will follow with the quality and pricing scheme that Apple does.
Then again, we are talking about the Evil Empire which does not care about giving away only taking away by its customers. How far back are you referring to. I've already talked above about this whole leaving previous versions behind thing. I'm not saying that they are completely perfect in this area, but there is also the case of leaving behind that which should be left behind. Show me an example of them dropping support for something that wasn't a 'natural' evolution for that product. If I'm not mistaken. Can I open an Access 97 DB under Access XP without problems?
Not even under Access 2000. Gimme a break. This isn't hardly a 'natural' evolution!
This is simply another lock-in. And the worst part, I repeat, is that M$ has supposedly both money and army of programmers to do it EASILY. But they do not want to do it. They don't care. Oh, I guess any Mac software doesn't count? And besides the Mac, what other platforms matter?
Why would they support an OS that they considered competitors? How does this make any sense. They are making fun of the Mac platform. Everything is too late too little.
Gimme a break. And although Linux is competitor as an OS how come and is competitor with say Office, IE, Outlook, etc?
If they were in their right minds they should have AT LEAST Office NEW version products for all major OSes out there. They could have more money because they could have more customers. IE hasen't improved (not that its perfect of course, far from it, but to say that it hasen't improved is just silly). Ditto for Windows in general, Office.
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All products where they basically have a lock on the market. If by improve you have something else more specific in mind, then we might have an agreement. Silly is to believe that IE holds a candle against Mozilla, Opera, Phoenix, et al. Not even in features other of course of crashing always. Or that M$ products are the best out there. Only on the bloat department! I have NT4 running on a PowerPC right now (email server).
I have several Alphas that will run NT (though I don't). And do you know why this support didn't live beyond Win2K, NOBODY wanted it. NT3.51 supported PPC, Alpha, and MIPS. Windows CE supports ARM, MIPS, Hitachi SHx, x86 and used to support PPC.
Gimme a break. They stop supporting NT even on Wintels. Me too, have that Spectrum loading Commando via tape. And of course nobody wanted it because the implementation of that time and because they didn't want to improve it was FUBAR compared to i386. As for CE: I cannot exactly use it for PhotoShop, can I?
You gonna tell me that M$ Watches are the next big thing for computers? Got a point here. This is one of the most annoying things about M$, the whole concept of them 'embracing' a standard. Basically the embrace of death. If I read you ok, my reply is: Since when Evil doesn't like Death?
They are one and the same. That is in response to you defining evil by it's acts, but yet these acts when done by other companies aren't evil? BTW, I don't define evil as the lack of good, as you seem to be leaning towards. Who said that most of nowadays companies, governments, et al aren't evil? Of course they are!
They are democratic monarchs And yes the lack of good is gain of evil which M$ and Intel truly are. Are you sure that you aren't a Sith Lord? Do you have a lock on your door (car or home)? Do you use it?
You do know that anyone with the right motivation can break into your house despite the locks, right? Do you brush your teeth, even people who brush their teeth religously get cavities. You miss the point, the point is to provide a system to make it MORE secure, not an impossible attempt to make it ABSOLUTELY secure. Plus there is an entire legal aspect. If the act of breaking the copyright involves the use of an explicit program whose only (or primary) purpose is the cracking of the documents DRM protections, then it is obvious that that is your intention.
You can't say, 'oh I didn't know I wasn't supposed to forward this on to everybody', since the only way you could have done so was to explicitly run an app to defeat this protection. In the business world, this is important when it's time to sick the legal dogs on them. So, you like leaving under locks and restrictions. Power to you.
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But it was a time that digital things weren't locked and still M$ made money. Back then they didn't know of legal stuff, etc? Gimme a break. If you have something to hide or fear about, you keep it in a safe or something. I think most people don't have safes, alarms, etc. At their houses. How come Wintel wants us to use more locks in a digital world than the real one?
Because they afraid to let people be truly free at that digital world they create as an ongoing process. They want people to be locked in a digital world. And no I'm not a technophobian one, I'm just a Dark Side opponent Once again, just because YOU don't see a useful purpose, please don't pretend that no one else can. This is your mis-informed opinion. I've given you examples of how this can be a very useful feature to many (esp in the corp.
If you choose to still ignore it, fine, but you are doing just that, ignoring realities. What about PGP? Password protected zipped files?
Scrumbled files? These aren't enough? Give yourself a break. YOU are trying to mis-inform us: A feature? A lock-in feature that is.
Because for the average Joe out there he/she will read that the new M$ product has this awesome feature and because other products do not have it (even the older ones from M$) he/she would go ahead and buy it even if he/she will NEVER use it. XP activation was never intended to be anything other than copy protection. AND once again, DRM is NOT A FORM OF SOFTWARE COPY PROTECTION.
It can surely be used as such (probably not very well) since an application is just a bunch of files, but this is not it's focus. BTW, what on earth does a firewall have to do with copy protection/DRM. Firewalls work extremely well. Just try getting into my computers at home from the internet (you can't since I have NO incoming ports that are available). You didn't read my exact words, did you? Because I had a full line which included this: ' 'insert ANY protection system here', which in everyday computer life it gets broken with the speed of light. ' I was talking about all those protection things in our digital lives.
We have more locks and protections in computers than a family who lives by having safe sex and their house is full of alarms, safes, unbreakable doors, windows bars, etc. If they want to protect companies they should do so by releasing a Windows DRM version or Office DRM version, etc. And give us a break. Ahhh, thank you for bringing this up as this will be a good way to finish this whole thread off (at least as far as I'm concerned).
I NEVER said that M$ wasn't 'evil'. You would be hard pressed to find ANYONE who dislikes M$ more than me. HOWEVER, the reasons I have are based on something more than a simple belief (M$ BAD) or these notions of their actions that are either not real, or not any different than anyone else. I've been in this industry for a long time and have seen M$ go from this dinky little outfit in rainy Washington to what they are now and have had years of actual observation and context to get to the opinion I have now (which has nothing to do with 'evil', but more to do with 'advancing the market'). Your reasons for sticking this 'evil' label are misguided and hold very little water. It's funny now this whole 'your either for us, or against us' attitude permeates. Just because I didn't accept your arguments, you automatically assumed that I was some M$ worshipper.
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It was your ARGUMENTS that I didn't accept. If you go back and read everything I've posted (both here and on the thread about Intel) I NEVER make any statements that apply a label of good or bad about either company (as a whole). You come up with these statements, I disagree with the statements and I tell you why, hopefully with facts and information to back me up. I try not to put out blanket statements that can not be verified or are based purely on baseless opinion. Simple as that.
You obviously have your mind in the camp you like to be in. You are of course free to have your opinions, I merely ask that if you profer some evidence to support that opinion, that this evidence be factual and provable and sensible in the proper context. But if a company which has BILLIONS of dollars and thousands of employees says this is the best that can offer it can only be pure EVIL. Simple as that. People out there help other people without them having not even the basics of every day life and this HUGE corporation would like us to believe that they created computers and the Internet. If this isn't evil, what is?
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PS.Damn even Apple which has A LOT LESS than M$ tries to give back by Open Sourcing and holding prices down for their software. M$ could even go ahead and give more products for free and not just IE and OE. And yes, Apple is in some extent, M$ and Intel puppet.