
Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad? - Cbasedlifeform
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/14/microsoft-office-ipad
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harrystone
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.

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

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Guvante
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.

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codeulike
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.

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

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codeulike
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.

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bananas
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.

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atourgates
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.

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

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cmsmith
It doesn't, and you know that.

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stcredzero
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.)

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

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stcredzero
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.

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kyriakos
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 ?

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mark-r
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.

