Microsoft backing Cyanogenmod, bringing Cortana to Android, and now acquiring productivity apps...
Looks like they are making a strong play to compete with Siri/Google Now which will be critical to the future of these big tech corps. Once AI gets better, everyone will want a 'smart assistant' helping them organize their day.
That will likely heavily influence which OS customers choose in the future as the data sensors need to sync across platforms to be really effective (desktop->mobile->watch->car etc).
I wonder if Microsoft allows third party Cortana-like personal assistants in Windows 10? Android is quite open in every aspect, something what Windows was always well known for.
As a Windows user with an iPhone I am very happy that they are bringing Cortana to iOS. I like unifying my environment, but I don't want to buy a new device to do that.
Do you actually use OneCloud on OSX and the mini office on Android?
I find OneCloud to be very smooth: I only have a 128GB SSD drive on my old MacBook Air and the selective sync lets me keep most of my videos, pictures, backups, etc. offline.
I don't use Office on the Android too much, but it seems OK enough.
BTW, I went with Office 365 as a price/cost decision. For $99/year my wife and I both get 1 TB of cloud storage, and if we want them the latest office suite. We both just use the web versions of the Office 365 apps on out MacBook Airs though.
EDIT: a bonus: the web based Office 365 apps are very useful on my Linux laptop - I stopped using Libre Office.
Yes, I went through a one mongth trial of Office 365 because the price seemed good and I really wanted to like it.
On OS X the OneDrive client had problems synchronizing my 80 GB archive - refused to synchronize files containing characters not accepted on Windows (like ":"), crashed several times and it was also saturating my network bandwidth. To make matters worse, OneDrive doesn't have basic functionality, like a log of what happened (files added, removed), let alone a 30 days version history. So I have to trust that their shitty client is doing the right thing.
The way I see it - yes, the Family pack is cost effective, but I'll never store 1 TB of my data on OneDrive without having logs, versioning and a client that does not suck for both OS X and Linux. I also think people get to be irrational about pricing - the price of 1 TB on Dropbox or Google Drive is as much as 2 Starbucks coffees.
On Android, Office wasn't available for my Nexus 6 (Android L) until 2 or 3 weeks ago when it was finally released. Gave it a try and it's too bare-bones, plus it had problems displaying documents from work. I expected it to work well as a viewer, but it doesn't.
I agree that it is annoying to occasionally have to remove special characters from file names. BTW, I also back up locally so a OneDrive error would be a real nuisance, but no real damage. I mainly like cloud storage for devices with small SSD drives, like my old MacBook Air.
I used to be a very happy Dropbox paying customer but I did not like their hiring of C. Rice to their board of directors.
Looks like they are making a strong play to compete with Siri/Google Now which will be critical to the future of these big tech corps. Once AI gets better, everyone will want a 'smart assistant' helping them organize their day.
That will likely heavily influence which OS customers choose in the future as the data sensors need to sync across platforms to be really effective (desktop->mobile->watch->car etc).