Office for iPhone v1.2 secrecy

Office WatchLast updated: 17 July 2018

Office 365,Office Mobile - iPad, Android, phones,Office Watch

What’s with Office Mobile apps and their secrecy?

Quietly, ever so quietly, Microsoft released a new version of Office for iPhone.

Version 1.2 was pushed out on 14 August 2014 to a complete silence from Microsoft. No blog post, no Knowledge Base article … nothing … not a sausage or even a sausage app.

The only thing we know about the update are two words. The only words that the Office Mobile team seems to know:

‘Bug fixes’

There was a time when a Microsoft staffer would be sacked for using the ‘B’ word in public. Now they happily use it and expect customers to be satisfied with that word alone.

This is the second time Office for iPhone has a ‘two word’ update and Microsoft refused to answer a direct question about “bug fixes and stability improvements” in Office for iPad.

Say what you like about updates to Office for Windows … and we’ve said plenty over 18 years of Office-Watch.com .. but at least its developers post information about bugs. Sure, they often do it only after the bug has been fixed, but at least there’s some information in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

The Office Mobile team is apparently exempt from Microsoft’s long standing practice of using the Knowledge Base to notify customers of bugs, workarounds and, hopefully, fixes.

This isn’t an accident or oversight. Microsoft has decided to severely limit the information they give customers about their products, even less than what they’ve given in the past. Under this regime, a single blog post (sometimes silently edited) is all that paying customers deserve.

Microsoft just doesn’t care. They don’t case about the time and trouble that bugs cause to customers. A software bug is a nuisance, but if it’s disclosed on the Knowledge Base at least a customer knows not to waste more time on it. Without proper disclosure, customers can waste hours trying to fix the unfixable.

Whatever is in the v1.1 update, it’s available from the Apps Store and should be automatically updated on your iPhone.