Microsoft launched the latest version of Office today (read our review), and the new apps are made for Windows 8. Strange, then, that the apps themselves — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook — aren't actually Windows 8 apps. The core of the new suite runs in a PC's desktop environment.
The new Office was supposedly tailored for touch, the cloud and social networks — the very same things behind the philosophy of Windows 8. Many features of the apps, such as PowerPoint's new Presenter View, are clearly made with touch in mind, so why didn't Microsoft go all the way and build Office 2013 as a Windows 8 app?
"Let's just say our apps were not naturally touch applications," P.J. Hough, Microsoft's vice president of Office program management, told Mashable. "I think if you look at what the Windows team did when they designed the interface, they obviously designed for touch first. In fact we did a lot of work in [the Office apps] to touch-enable them, but the contract Windows has for these particular apps is different than the internal capabilities of Office."
What Hough is referring to is the new way apps in Windows 8 talk to each other, which involve apps establishing a "contract" with each other to share data. In order to provide the safest experience for the user, Windows 8 apps are essentially sandboxed. For apps to interact, they typically must use the operating system's Share charm.
However, Office — as it was designed to work in previous versions — has built-in sharing capabilities ("Share to OneNote," for example). Those features would have to be rebuilt to work with the new user interface.
While the Office team could have done that, Hough says Microsoft didn't want to rush out a Windows 8 version of Office and risk serving up a poor user experience.
"It's a significant opportunity," he says. "I think the mistake would be to take what we have today on the desktop and somehow make it work in the Windows 8 environment. Over time, we will have to re-engineer the Office products — re-imagine them in new ways."
Hough points out that both OneNote and Lync run in the Windows 8 environment. Eventually the Office team will take what it's learning from those apps and apply it to a new Office suite that's designed from the start for Windows 8 — which he says Microsoft will definitely ship someday.
"We're committed to delivering a full set of Office experiences on Windows 8," says Hough. "We've gotten a lot of experience from OneNote and Lync, and we're going to continue down that path.
"How do you integrate with the new features of the operating system — the charms, for example? How do you take advantage of the new navigation? what do you do differently if you presume cloud-backed storage first? We've added a lot of those capabilities to Office, but we decided not to rush and just jam something in."
Also likely a factor: hardware. Windows 8 PCs with touchscreens have only been available since the fall, and many users are upgrading to Windows 8 but using it on non-touch machines. Creating a version of Office that presumes touch would be premature for many Windows 8 users.
How would you build Office as a pure Windows 8 app? Let us know in the comments.
Review: Office 365 Home Premium
Image courtesy of Microsoft
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