One of the things that is missing from the comments here that say "Office Substitute X does 99% of what users need" is that in most companies, there is already a way of doing a task.
In many complex tasks, Excel is a front end to a complex business process. That business process is kicked off by some VBA code that talks to some COM object that talks to the back-end infrastructure. For example, in Finance, there are scenarios where that COM object kicks off a job on a Linux HPC cluster to compute, for example, the risk of a position that a trader is interested in. While "Office Substitute X" could potentially do the same thing, the trader has absolutely zero interest in using anything other than Excel, and he/she is the rainmaker.
So there is very little cannibalization of the existing desktop Office business for Enterprise customers. What this seems to be doing is taking people's familiarity with Office at work, and making it cheaper/easier for them to continue to experience Office in their personal lives.
Microsoft isn't concerned about losing the high end uses of Excel and Word, it's people not needing Word or Excel for documents or spreadsheets. They're already losing the very bottom end to Google Docs and other online tools, the question is whether they can hold the middle.
Office and Windows have a symbiotic relationship, and most of Microsoft's other products hang off of these two. Losing Office or Windows could prove disastrous for Microsoft.
I don't think MS Office* has ever really held the low end though, no? That was held by Works back in the day, or even WordPad. And if it was Word, then it was most likely on some educational discount or hardware bundle, meaning not much revenue in the first place for Microsoft.
Lately Google Docs and Pages have filled those spots, but I suspect this giveaway is just shoring up or buffering their stronghold in the workplace.
Strongly agreed on the symbiotic relationship. I actually bought a full version of Win7 and VMWare Fusion just to run the "real" Office apps on my Mac. (Tellingly, the actual Office Suite was only $10, through the Home Use Program)
* EDIT: Changed "I don't think Microsoft has ever..."
On Windows they always held the low end with a free version of Office, which was a pirated copy. This is much harder on iOS, and I think with this move Microsoft acknowledges that they need to offer this version too.
I think you misunderstand the point of most of those comments. Numbers and Google Sheets for iPad have been available for months, so Microsoft's offering has to demonstrate value above and beyond those. Unfortunately, the 2014 offering doesn't really do that.
Having encountered an issue before (The workbook you are trying to open is an ISO Strict file), it's not clear if Microsoft actually leveraged the existing Office code in the mobile versions: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2960660
months? Don't you mean years? At least Numbers has been available since the very first iPad AFAIK - one of the things that Apple clearly did better with their iPad introduction compared to MS's Surface introduction with no touch optimized Office.
VBA is joyless. I started my career as VBA dev. It was the shitiest job I've ever had and worst job I can imagine to do. Bloated unreliable with disgusting API (like try catching for contains method on collection).
I had a job in university that involved picking up 20-foot-long sections of freshly sawn lumber (some of which weighed well over a hundred pounds) off of a moving set of chains and placing them in bins. That's it, for a 10 hour shift.
VBA sucks, but come on, there are worse jobs out there.
My first job (at 14) was a dishwasher. Not as bad as yours by the sound of it, but it was filthy and disgusting and I got paid $3.35 per hour.
Having that job put all my programming jobs in perspective. To preserve that I have a picture of a dude in a coal mine by my phone at work. Any time I'm asked to submit a pointless form, I think of that guy. I don't do this to shame myself but rather to put my work problems into perspective which helps me.
In many complex tasks, Excel is a front end to a complex business process. That business process is kicked off by some VBA code that talks to some COM object that talks to the back-end infrastructure. For example, in Finance, there are scenarios where that COM object kicks off a job on a Linux HPC cluster to compute, for example, the risk of a position that a trader is interested in. While "Office Substitute X" could potentially do the same thing, the trader has absolutely zero interest in using anything other than Excel, and he/she is the rainmaker.
So there is very little cannibalization of the existing desktop Office business for Enterprise customers. What this seems to be doing is taking people's familiarity with Office at work, and making it cheaper/easier for them to continue to experience Office in their personal lives.