Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad?

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/14/microsoft-office-ipad

by Cbasedlifeform • 12 years ago

21 32 12 years ago

harrystone• 12 years ago

I imagine the strategy is that if you want Office on a tablet, you need to buy a Surface. Apparently it's not reason enough.

devx• 12 years ago

People don't buy whole devices for an app. Or at least not most people.

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

People don't buy whole devices for an app.

For the record, I've heard variants of the exact opposite argument for why "people will never switch from iOS to Android", or "I could never give up $APP on my iPhone".

If Office really is that important to you, then yes, you might actually consider getting a Surface (tablet/laptop combo) instead of a Macbook and an iPad separately.

Silhouette3• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's not true, and many people do very much buy a device for one killer app. Look at games consoles, if the tablet market alone isn't convincing.

However, I very much doubt anyone is going to buy a tablet-style device (of any brand) for this kind of application, because it's a silly kind of application to run on a tablet-style device.

Guvante• 12 years ago

What reasons do you believe people are buying devices for it not the applications on them?

If you are putting the emphasis on app then I would point out that Office is used by almost as many people as Facebook, so an app is a bit of an over simplification.

gebe• 12 years ago

You get the full Office 2013 suite with most x86 tablets nowadays (which you won't when you buy a Surface oddly enough). For me that definitely played a part in my decision to get an Asus T100.

bananas3• 12 years ago

Because it's an awful productivity device?

It has no usable filesystem, poor integration between applications, awful input device support, a tiny screen and is impractical for office work.

Yes I do own one for reference.

aaronblohowiak• 12 years ago

impractical for office work

yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad. If you are mostly an email person, being able to open these attachments is useful.

kyriakos2• 12 years ago

everytime i see people with ipads in meetings (same applies for android tablets) they usually use them as document viewers. why do you need a full office suite to do that?

genericuser• 12 years ago

yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad

Do you mean a lot of people bring iPads to meetings as an alternative to devices practical for office work? Or am I missing something?

atourgates• 12 years ago

Have you tried one with a good bluetooth keyboard/enclosure?

I was surprised with how much of a difference it makes. I got an iPad3 at launch, and never bothered with a keyboard cover. It was, like you said, an awful productivity device. I got a keyboard cover with my iPad Air, and it made a night & day difference in terms of productivity.

Pacabel• 12 years ago

How does that help remedy the other four problems he mentioned, especially the ones totally independent of input devices, though?

nirnira2• 12 years ago

I tried using iPads with keyboard covers. Having to constantly switch between tapping the screen and typing was a dealbreaker for me. There's zero integration for keyboards beyond the ability to type in textboxes and a few system shortcuts. You can't even select apps with the arrow keys on the homescreen!

kyriakos2• 12 years ago

office for ipad will cannibalize windows sales. unless the question is if microsoft is willing to sacrifice revenue from windows to earn more from office.

and if they release office for ipad how long after will they release it for android ?

mark-r• 12 years ago

Even if they were successful, it's unlikely that they'd earn more from Office by being on the iPad. It's not going to sustain the prices that Microsoft is used to. This is their dilemma, they simply can't win no matter which way they go.

stcredzero4• 12 years ago

What if someone released a "limited virtual machine" that included WINE running inside an emulator but only allowed you to install Office on it? Emulation performance concerns aside, it's actually possible to capture all the keystrokes coming from a bluetooth keyboard on iOS. (And get it in the store if you're sneaky enough.) It should be possible to do this. (I also have a scheme for dealing with the mouse UI.)

YokoZar• 12 years ago

I'm not sure an iPad would have enough computing power to run VM + QEMU + Wine + Office.

stcredzero4• 12 years ago

You can leave off the VM, as it's redundant to QEMU. Also, there are emulation strategies that rewrite the machine language to the native ISA instead of interpreting. One of those that cached the translated code would be more appropriate than QEMU emulation. WINE Is Not an Emulator, it's more of a library.

It would be hard, but it would be doable.

EDIT: New iPads are supposed to be equivalent to a low end dual core laptop from a few years ago.

codeulike2• 12 years ago

I stopped installing office on my PCs about 10 years ago, for the first few years replaced with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and more recently things like wikis and confluence and google docs. Its amazing how little it really matters. Most of the stuff I get sent by MS Office users I can interop with. But every parent in the country still thinks their kids need Office installed to do their homework.

Occasionally you get people who have gone really over the top on the Word or Powerpoint template so that the thing is totally unreadable on any non-MS platform. I was thinking we need a campaign really - "Keep your document formatting simple" -- no one is impressed with logos in footers or really complicated tables within word or clever animations on powerpoint anymore ... if everyone stuck to the 80% of features that interop well we'd be much better off.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

"logos in footers" is now an advanced, "over-the-top" piece of formatting?

warmfuzzykitten• 12 years ago

Yes.

codeulike2• 12 years ago

Yes. Twenty years ago when adding logos to a page layout was a minor technical challenge, you could show some professionalism by sticking your logo everywhere. It made it look expensive. These days it just makes it look like you're a Word Noob.

Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad?

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