Office Live, maybe.
Microsoft prepping Office for iPad?
Microsoft is said to be preparing a version of its Office productivity suite for Apple's überpopular fondleslab, the "magical and revolutionary" iPad. So say unnamed sources speaking – fittingly enough – to The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's less than wildly successful iPad newspaper, launched with great fanfare this February. The …
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Wednesday 30th November 2011 02:35 GMT P. Lee
If true, probably web based
As a pad cpu is going to disappoint with all the stuff Office 2010 does.
They probably need to do this as more powerful arm chips are on their way and they need to lock in mobile devices as MSOffice users before they settle on something else (Pages, Libreoffice or something new). Otherwise you might end up with large android/ipad tablets sprouting keyboards and moving into the ultrabook space bringing linux, OSX/iOS with them with no cash for MS.
Could IT become interesting again?
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Wednesday 30th November 2011 12:14 GMT jonathanb
Or maybe not
I'm sure you can use Office 365 on your slab at the moment, or if you can't, it won't take a lot of work to get it working. Certainly, I can get onto my office web apps for sharepoint without any problems other than finding a network signal of some sort.
However, the iPad version of office won't do everything the desktop version can, for the simple reason that the iPad is not a desktop replacement. It will do the sorts of things you can do on Office for Windows Mobile & Windows Phone, except with the benefit of a larger screen you will be able to actually do stuff most of the time rather than continually scrolling everywhere and revealing and hiding toolbars.
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Wednesday 30th November 2011 05:41 GMT alwarming
Supposedly Office is run as a separate business within Microsoft.
But if it was *truly* an independent business it would have done that long ago, along with an ubuntu/linux version.
In future (or even today?), M$ will no longer have a total monopoly on consumer computing devices. If M$ BUs have to survive they need to look beyond Windows as a platform. Azure, xbox, office - they all need to expand their market. Does IBM storage work with only mainframes ? No. They work fine with Linux and HP-UX. Why ? Because they are separate businesses within IBM and they don't want to be stifled.
Having a common denominator sometimes makes sense when sharing a technology can cut R&D costs.. (using IBM example again: like use of PowerPC in all IBM servers which shreas the R&D cost.). But keeping windows as a common platform is not helping office that much (agreed maintaining closeness to 1 platform is easy.. but once they had a port on Mac, they effectively disassociated with the underling OS and they can do it again).
Paris, coz she likes freedom of keeping what's underneath her.
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Wednesday 30th November 2011 10:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Apple 30% for doing nothing..
other than testing, vetting, hosting, advertising, credit card transaction handling, banking. Yup, that sure is nothing.
As to Office for the iPad, I'd be amazed if they didn't as its an obvious revenue stream given the popularity of apps such as Documents to go and Apples own office type apps.
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