tymshft

Office on iPad – two thoughts

Loren Feldman shared a link to a New York Times article about the availability of Microsoft Office on the iPad.

My first reaction was to something the Times said:

Microsoft introduced the long-awaited suite of applications, which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel, at an event here Thursday, where the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella, committed to making the software work on all major computing devices, including those made by its competitors. Microsoft plans to create Office apps for tablet computers running Google’s Android operating system, too.

To some, the move is a refreshing sign of a new Microsoft, one slowly unshackling itself from an era when its major decisions were made in deference to Windows, Microsoft’s operating system. But skeptics wonder if Microsoft has waited too long, giving people who use iPads, especially business professionals, years to get used to life without it and giving an opening to start-ups and Apple’s competing products.

The tenor of the article suggested that Microsoft was doing something new.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike Apple, who enforced an “Apple only” mindset until reluctantly making iTunes available for Windows, Microsoft has consistently provided products for non-Microsoft platforms. In fact, when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, one of the featured vendors was…Microsoft.

My second reaction was based upon Loren Feldman’s reaction to the idea of leading vendors offering subscription services – or, in Feldman’s words, “[p]aying to edit a doc.” This prompted me to add a comment that reflected what I’ve been saying in this blog (and others) for years, and to offer one of my extremely accurate (or extremely inaccurate) predictions. My comment:

I strongly believe in a pendulum model in which we’ve bounced between centralized and decentralized computing over the last few decades. We’re obviously in a centralized mode now, with cloud computing all the rage and with our mobile device applications (such as Siri) heavily dependent upon centralized servers somewhere else.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that in the next few years there will be a lot of rain on the cloud parade.

Pong was just a training exercise. It trained the entire video game industry.

I’m sure that younger people stare in disbelief when they see the computer game Pong for the first time. “That’s it?” they probably say to themselves. Compared to modern games, or even 1980s games such as PacMan, Pong is one of the most boring games in history. Yet this game not only changed the company Atari, but it created an entire videogame industry.

According to ponggame.org, Atari’s original mandate was to create games for other companies. Along the way, one employee, Allan Alcorn, created Pong as a training exercise. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell made a few tweaks and put the game in a bar. The success of the game at the bar (yes, alcohol was involved in the creation of Pong) convinced Bushnell that Atari should manufacture the game itself, rather than licensing it out.

By the time Pong’s run had ended several years later, Atari had not only sold 35,000 Pong machines, but had also sold 150,000 units to the home market.

Today, the Pong Game is considered to be the game which started the video games industry, as it proved that the video games market can produce significant revenues.

If you want to experience Pong for yourself, go here. Your computer should probably be able to handle the game’s technical demands.