Office 365 is now on Mac App Store
Big move. I see this potentially as groundwork for the eventual integration of Mac and iOS App Stores, which you have to imagine is something Apple wants in the years ahead as platforms converge on common software stack and UX. It&#x27;s also a signal that the App Store team may now be willing to do the deals necessary to attract MacOS apps back toward this larger strategic initiative (vs just trying to maximize revenue).<p>From Microsoft&#x27;s perspective, now that Windows is sidelined, Office is their primary consumer platform and that means UX outweighs any strategic tax of trying to make the Windows version better.<p>Have you tried to download Office from their website? It&#x27;s a horrible, braindead experience. You have to log in to your Live account, then go to a particular page to manage your existing Office installs that is super confusing. Coupled with the poor autoupdate UX on Mac [1], and it&#x27;s almost like Microsoft doesn&#x27;t want you to have Office on Mac.<p>I think the issue finally reached a breaking point there and they shifted to UX &gt; control. This is a positive shift for them, since being on the App Store means features ship faster and users see value in their Office subscription. Aside from update UX this is obviously a way to bump their Mac Office numbers. Seems like a good play from both Apple &amp; Microsoft&#x27;s perspective.<p>[1] Right now Microsoft&#x27;s autoupdate UX is pretty terrible at keeping things up to date. When I visit my parents, they&#x27;re almost always several versions behind, and as another commenter pointed out, a decent part of that is the autoupdate needing to update itself. They have automated updates but its hard to trust that process won&#x27;t result in issues when documents are open, and it presents a lot of cognitive load to users on top of the OS &amp; App Store updates.