back to article MS Office on iOS is OFF the menu, says Fujitsu as it nixes Personal Cloud

Fujitsu has put its Personal Cloud project on ice after failing to reach licensing agreements with the likes of Microsoft to deliver applications on devices that could run an HTML 5 browser. However, Joseph Reger, the Japanese vendor’s CTO, says he still believes the licensing model is inevitable as customers become …

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  1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    I've been on about MS licensing trauma since VMware became a thing and saw the writing on the wall. Oh, but I'm a daft lad spinning madness from the sweet silk of Microsoft's loving EULAs. Or so I've been told.

    Seems to me that there is a rash of people telling MS's licensing department to "shove it" right now. Please excuse me while I cackle with glee.

    If Microsoft want to have a snowball's chance in a neutron star of surviving the next 15 years as anything other than another has-been niche player they are going to need to stop hiring butt-snorkling yes-men to design their strategy and start hiring their harshest critics. They have lost touch with SMEs, enthusiasts, power users, regular users, desktop users, touch users, partners, developers, systems administrators and are now losing touch with the CIOs of enterprises as well.

    I'll not hold my breath; the egos in Redmond are such that they would rather death before admission of fallibility, but I can hope beyond hope that this company my career has been built on will turn itself around. Fleeting and unfulfilled as that dream will ultimately prove to be...

    1. Anomalous Cowturd
      Pint

      Butt-snorkling.

      I'm stealing that one.

      Cheers Trev! ;o)

    2. GordonJ

      Licensing reform will still be a long time coming!

      I've been criticising the MS licensing system for years (e.g. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/899048 )!

      Since the first time I had to order a MS Windows Server 2003 license for development use and started to get lots of "advisors" who wanted to guide me along the path of ensuring compliance I could feel that pain properly and sympathise with the poor guys that have to deal with this every day.

      All of sudden Samba and anything-but-Exchange made perfect sense. I still think the on-premise, open source equivalent of Exchange is still difficult to deliver well (especially if constrained by people insisting on Outlook) but it really is the fact that you're having to pay several times for a single function. Want a user to access their e-mail and some files on a server? That'll be client OS, server OS, client software, server software, and at least a couple of client access licenses... IM too? At least another three sets of licenses...

      Is it any wonder Microsoft are running scared of the simpler Google model?

      The big interest for me here is that having thought they need to simplify for years, suggesting being able to licence components you need, effectively increasing the options, is something different entirely. I really need to think that one through.

      In the meantime, the push to increasing prices via the cloud will continue... at least they're trying something, even if it completely screws people like us. We will indeed just go somewhere else.

    3. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Microsoft have their strategy

      It involves parting company with SMEs, enthusiasts, power users, regular users, desktop users, touch users, partners, developers, systems administrators and becoming a really expensive niche player for customers with more money than the sense to port their applications out of Windows.

      If your customers are locked in with you as much as Microsoft, increase your prices to match fewer customers with expensive requirements. Otherwise, it is time for you to leave Microsoft to their niche.

    4. Euripides Pants
      Thumb Up

      Upvote for the butt snorkeling

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As I am weaning myself off M$ as quickly as possible and have never used iOS, this to me is a "Non-news story".

    https://www.libreoffice.org <<< Works brilliantly.

    https://duckduckgo.com <<< All the search, none of the tracking.

  3. Zippy's Sausage Factory
    Windows

    Microsoft just see prices going up and up... they lowered the price of Windows 8 for a while hoping for a massive success and then had to crow about it selling about as many as Vista despite being less than a quarter of the price.

    How long before people wake up and start to see Office 365 (I originally mistyped Office 386, but that feels like a Freudian slip now) as a massive price hike, like they seem to be reacting to Adobe Creative Cloud? I can see Libre/Open Office gaining lots of new corporate users over this...

  4. Humpty McNumpty

    Dodging Exchange

    It would be a mistake to lay all the blame at MS's door when it comes to SME's. As the in-house IT guy for a small CEM I have to tell you a large part of the problem lies with with the re-seller network or "Microsoft Business Partners" if you like. The installation costs alone that I have been quoted on a Windows Server setup have been horrific considering my Zentyal setup took me, a n00b, under a day.

    Of course as a non professional I do have some concerns as to just how quickly I could put it all back together if something went horribly wrong and this means the good old "Cloud" is something has has quite a bit of appeal. Now if there is a problem, it's not mine but equally I have less control and as mentioned before licencing models even on something like 365 do not allow the flexibility needed by an SME so you end up paying for things you do not need.

    In a small business margins a slim and investment needs a demonstrable return; £12k+ for a server for <15 users would buy a sizable piece of time saving manufacturing hardware.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Dodging Exchange

      Twelve thousand pounds for a physical server? Dafuq?

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/22/building_it_test_lab_2/ <--reading required.

      1. Humpty McNumpty

        Re: Dodging Exchange

        Yes, split roughly equally between hardware, OS & installation, ongoing support would have been an extra even for year 1.

        No wonder I went for a HP microserver rammed with disks ;)

        1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

          Re: Dodging Exchange

          For that price the software better have been etched onto platters using an STM by carefully trained temple virgins who were then tossed into volcanoes at the end of the application creation in order to prevent outsiders from gaining knowledge of "the bits."

  5. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    How???

    "I've been on about MS licensing trauma since VMware became a thing and saw the writing on the wall. Oh, but I'm a daft lad spinning madness from the sweet silk of Microsoft's loving EULAs. Or so I've been told."

    Oh yes, Microsoft's view several years ago seemed to be essentially... 1) People MUST use Microsoft software. 2) People are beginning to use virtual machines more. Conclusion? Make sure the licensing makes people buy as many licenses for as much money as possible. Certainly a logical conclusion if there wasn't plenty of nice non-Microsoft products to use.

    Office on iOS and Android? Yuck. I'm not even going to go into how much I hate that ribbon and so on, the fact of the matter is Office 2013 is cramped on a 17" screen; how would it possibly be adapted to a tablet, let alone a phone?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How???

      1. no ribbon

      They are taking a plain vanilla, full-screen approach, with floating touch controls. It looks nice enough, but I'd say it's useful only in moments of desperation.

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