Microsoft working to bring its Office apps to iPad, Mac OS X Lion - Page 2

Sorry, Keynote knocks spots off of PowerPoint.

Wii sales have dropped like a stone, and so have DS sales. While 3DS sales have tripled recently due to a few new games, it's still a small number. While hardware sales are very important to them, they make a great deal of money through royalties from their own games and licenses from others.

Their main problem with licensing is that their games cost $25 and even more, while iOS games average just a couple of bucks, with the best costing $10.

They are in a pickle, having lost almost a billion dollars the first half of their fiscal year. The WiiU is looking to be a dog, and won't be out until mid 2012.

They've got a lot of problems, and for the past two years, they've been blaming Apple for that.

Oh no, Ribbon is coming! iPad will feel like 7" tablet... hahaha!

It's not gaining traction at all. Ballmer, (remember him?) said recently that WP7 sales went from "very small to very small". It's been out for a year now, and no growth at all. The iPhone sold almost 14 million in the first 12 months, and that was for one, expensive phone model. WP7 has four manufacturers, including the two most popular Android manufacturers, HTC and Samsung, and 9 phone models (now more with Mango), and is estimated to be selling at a pace of between 1.25 and 1.75 million a quarter.

So far, Nokia's WP 7 phone sales are so so.

You think win phone7 is gaining traction pretty rapidly? Compared to what? I'd like to see you make a case for that statement instead of just making the statement itself. Do you mean you think other companies are in fact being smug and that will be an opportunity for gaining traction?

There is no Mobile Office software, so MS didn't give it away with WP7 phones. What they have is a very primitive app that doesn't allow you to edit anything, just to view it. That's what they're giving away.

I agree about Sony and the PS3. But Sony gained a lot with that. They killed HD-DVD which MS backed. It's doubtful that MS has gained much with the XBox, as it's cost them $9 billion over the years, with little to show for it. They're making modest profits on it now, but it will never come close to maki g up the losses. Sony is estimated to have lost $3 billion on the PS3 after having made $8 billion on the older models. But they are making big money on Blue-Ray while losing money in other places, such as with their Tv's. They are also making modest profits on the PS3 now.

It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that they're selling the same product now that was introduced 5 years ago? Even the Wii Family Edition (which isn't even available worldwide) offers nothing significantly new compared to the older version.

The only reason that Wii sales continued as long as they did was that their supply situation was so messed up that until a year or two ago, finding one in a store was nearly impossible.




I really hope that Microsoft learns that you don't simply port a full blown desktop Office to a tablet - but I'm not holding my breath.

I would pay $15 for a full blown version of Excel on my iPad2, but i don't want or need Word, Outlook or PowerPoint, so I hope MS make it possible to buy the individual packages.

AND, if Tim says, NAAA , as he should, then what? Hey Bomber...POUND SAND !!!

You know where Sony's money comes from? TV's? Blu-ray? Gaming? Movie/music content?

Nope.

Life Insurance!

It's crazy to think about since most people see Sony as a "consumer electronics" company, but Sony would be way better off if they actually sold off their "consumer electronics" division.

How is iWork pathetic? Care to elaborate on your troll? iWork is way better than the bloated over-priced Microsoft Office.

How is it gaining traction? Windows Phone is a total failure. The UI is horrid and unusable. Best thing is they are going to force people to use that horrid UI in Windows 8. This will drive more people into Apples waiting arms. It is fun to hear how shocked converts are the first few days with a Mac. I always hear the same thing...something along the lines of..."wow, i never knew Windows was so bad. This is amazing!"

Good news since I skipped Office 2011. If Office 2013(??) for Mac is around the corner I'll just wait for it and maybe even get the iPad version as well.
Now when does Apple intend on releasing a new version of iWork? Among many things, I want ODF support.

I totally agree with you that the iPad is a different kind of computer to a Mac/PC and the kind of functionality you get out of an iPad isn't the same as as Mac/PC.

I think Microsoft understands this. They aren't going to try and cram Office 2010 with the ribbon an all onto an iPad. Microsoft will fit the functionality to the device.

If you look at the preview of Windows Live for Windows 8 and the Office Hub on Windows Phone you will get a sense of what I'm talking about.

Office on iOS would fit in well with small business or enterprise, especially if they are using something like Office 365 to manage their data.

I'm not so sure how important it is for home users though. As crap as software like iWork and Google Docs are they are also very cheap/free.

If all you need Office for is to do a couple of shopping lists and for your 8 year old to do a school report it would be hard to justify the cost of Microsoft Office.

Yeah, it's an exaggeration to say Microsoft "depends" on Apple, certainly not for survival. I mean, Microsoft would have happily coasted along setting Windows Mobile and pen-based UMPCs if Apple hadn't rocked the status quo, and Microsoft would have done just fine selling us new copies of the same old Office year after year, now with jazzier toolbar icons.

On the other hand, think of this way: this is the first time in forever that Microsoft has expanded MS Office to a new platform. Microsoft might not "depend" on it, but you have to credit Apple for creating a new hardware platform (iPad) that in just under 2 years got big enough for Microsoft to justify porting Office to it. That is no small feat. How many Microsoft challengers have tried to do that over the years? OS/2? Linux? Chrome OS?

I certainly did and I will buy Office for the Mac as soon as I work at the university, which is tomorrow. I'm a bit fed up with all the things that just don't work right.

Tim won't say NAAA because why should he? Office on the iPad means more iPads being sold. I don't think Tim will have a problem with that.

Is this Ballmer's quoting ?

Apple seems to have given up on iWork for OSX and not bothered to tell anyone. We've not heard anything for over 3 years now. I would dearly love to finally cut all links to MS but I need a good office suite for work. The only thing I really hate about Apple is how they seem to lose interest in a product without warning and leave their customers high and dry.

I don't care about iWork for iOS. I don't use my iPhone or iPad all day every day for work. But I do use my Mac all day every day. Just for once Apple should start thinking about it's customers instead of it's seemingly relentless pursuit of profit/cash.

I like Excel, but in my opinion, an iPad version without the features of cloud storage and availability would really handicap it for an iPad user. Currently, an iPad user who also has a Mac can put Numbers on both machines and have their files at the ready anywhere they go.

Although I don't see Microsoft putting all the Office features into an iOS version, I would bet that the cloud Office 365/SharePoint and SkyDrive integration would be one of them.

They have been doing it in Office 2010 for 18 months now and it's one of the features they brought into the limited Office Hub in Windows Phone 7.

If you didn't on Office for PC/Mac you could even use the Office Web Apps on your desktop then open those files on your iOS devices when required.

I'm not sure if they will link into the iCloud documents API as well. Probably not though.

Overall this seems like a good idea. Microsoft is a software company after all an throughout there history have made software for other platforms. Bringing Office to iPad sounds like an essential move for Sky Drive, Office 365 and Sharepoint. Depending how quick Google is to respond it could give them a sizable lead in those markets. Apple on the other hand doesn't look like it's ever going to move past the version of Office that MS gives away for free, and certainly has not intention to go into the corporate market.


What do you mean you can't edit anything? You can edit OneNote, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files on it. Powerpoints quite restrictive in that you can only edit the text, but then what more do you really want to do on a phone.


I wouldn't say WP7 sales are going to be huge any time soon, but Facebook logins from WP7 phones reportedly went through a huge increase recently so there's signs that things might be changing.

If Apple and MS can hammer something out to bring Office to iOS that would be HUGE. I know my company for one would instantly order thousands of iPads. We can't get a solid business case for them right now, but if we could work excel and powerpoint on them in a solid fashion...game over for laptops used now.

And my company employs 35,000 people, is a fortune top 100 at worst, is the top company in our industry, and news has been made about a couple of our competitors outfitting a certain part of their employee base with ipads to reduce weight.

Well if we're comparing to the gains that RIM is making sure



No that is taking Steve's statement the day he announced Microsoft was partnering w/Apple and investing $150M in them, then swapping Microsoft for Apple. The original statement was him talking about how for Apple to win, MS doesn't have to lose.

I thought it was a Ballmer's statement, during a stage presentation, during which a giant smiling (but moderately, as always with him) Tim's face would appear on the screen, explaining how much Apple care about Microsoft. Must be dreaming ...

Get a clue. I love Apple products but I don't defend everything they make... The iWork suite is great for students or as a home office suite, but in the business world, it is a joke.

For what reasons is it unsuited for business use?

Translation:

"Microsoft is working on updating its software for iOS5 (the leading mobile OS platform) and Mac OS X, so we can continue to lock people into our Office formats, since Apple's iWork apps are actually quite decent and causing people to try working without Office.

It will take a while to ensure we calibrate the appropriate amount of bloatware, screen-real-estate-stealing Ribbon UI modifications, font cache issues, and security loopholes, to make the software fit for release."

@Tallest Skil

Well, for one, Numbers can't rotate text in a cell to make narrow columns with regular size labels easy to read. For another, Numbers has no Pivot Tables. Oh, and very few people have Numbers in the business world (guessing) so the nice advantages that Numbers gives you like arbitrary spacing and number of tables, don't translate well to people you'd be sharing with.

There's a ton of stuff that Pages and Numbers introduced like live updating and an entirely new paradigm for controlling tasks using multi touch --particularly impressive to me in Numbers for the iPad-- but on the desktop, Microsoft has been caught up with that stuff for awhile. It live updates as you drag or hover in most of the important situations and the organization of the ribbon far surpasses the unruly palettes toolbar combinations in iWork, imo.

Microsoft has been rocking as far as I'm concerned and I've been using Macs as my primary computers for decades. Microsoft Office 2007 showed that there were people at Microsoft willing to make real user-focused improvements to their software and Windows 7 is finally a Windows OS I can enjoy, not just use.

There's a lot to love in Lion, but until its supported by Apps that matter to me, it's all about promise. I'm getting this feeling that Apple's current approach to software is really about showing the way things should be done and provided the APIs to do it. This is why there are flashes in the pan like iWork that blow people's minds momentarily, but then Apple just hopes someone else will then take the cool innovative parts and run with it for the long term.

I'm still holding out hope for another big splash from iWork and iLife, though.

I will not enter here into respective technical merits of Numbers, Excel, Open Office, etc ..

I personally use OpenOffice (although I have bought iWork & Numbers), because it is free, satisfies all my needs, and provides compatibility with Microsoft Office files. I have to admit this is probably also due to laziness on my part (reluctance to enter into iWork user interface, simply because the everyday experience you have in using Microsoft Office at work makes difficult (or better, inconvenient) for you to switch to something else at home).

Anyway, computers, tablets, now have a much wider usage, and despite the fact that in office environment, they are still number one applications, Office suites (word processor, spreadsheets, etc ...) are no longer key applications for most users.

As noted by other posts, even if Microsoft succeeds to provide attractive iOS versions of Office, it will also have to change its pricing policy, which is simply outrageous. Same will be true in other environments, because alternatives do exist ... and pricing matters.

again, did not answer the question. I use iWork daily at work and it does way more than i need. How is it a joke?

Not really, because all the consoles are 5 years old. The problem is that Nintendo deliberately came out with a low cost device. While that allowed them to make profits back right away, and sold more than anyone, likely including themselves, expected. It hasn't held up as well.

But the Nintendo machines are more aimed to kids than to adults. As people grow up they lose interest. As they grow up, they buy iPhones and Android devices, and play games on them instead. Sure, gameplay is compromised as a result, but the truth is that most people are perfectly with at level of gameplay.

But kids are also getting iPhones, iPod Touches and even iPads.

Now, the iPad has become a major gaming platform. I'm looking forward to getting Infinity Blade II tonight, as many others will be. For $7 we're getting a better bargain than any console games we can buy. And the gameplay is pretty good on the older game, and is supposed to be better on this, from what I've been reading. The iPad 2 is about as powerful as the Wii, and the iPad 3 will be as powerful as the PS3 and 360. That's saying something. With AirPlay, this will be a killer.

Well, to all intents and purposes, you can't do anything. You are limited to a very small subset of features. There are better apps for that them what Ms offers.

Reportedly? Where reportedly? Last quarter's sales are estimated to be the same 1.25-1.75 million as the other quarters. That's no growth. Some increase in Facebook logins would be expected as the total number of phones increases, but that doesn't mean that sales are rising.

Considering the old joke about Word, that 80% of users use 20% of the features, that would make Word a joke, wouldn't it? Actually Pages is pretty good. But it's not designed as a specialized program. Apple leaves that to MS.

So if Apple puts in the 20% that the 80% use, plus some extras, then it's a pretty good program for most uses, including that of small businesses, which, by the way, do use Pages, Numbers, etc. when you consider the costs, either for the OS X. Suit, or the apps, it's a pretty good bargain.

Is Infinity Blade 2 still basically an on rails RPG? The first one was pretty but horribly limited. Call me crazy, but a new Zelda is worth the money compared to that.

Assume Nintendo brings its properties to iOS. Then assume the first slew of Nintendo games on iOS are $25 each. At least, the biggest first-party titles: the ones based around characters that show up in the Super Smash Bros. series of games.

People would buy them by the millions. At $25. First, they're used to $50 launch titles from the members of the Big Three. Second, it's quite possible they'd be worth it. Sure, they'd probably be the physically largest games on the entire App Store, but they'd be expansive.

i call it willful ignorance to think multinational corporations restrict themselves to one market. the same can be said when some people consider Samsung as one monolithic entity.

Microsoft has released software on Apple products for decades; no surprise here and it's business as usual.

Yes. Prefer Works or Office. Works because it works better. Office because it's real MS Office and not a half assed office suite pushing ODF on me. Also docx support is still flaky in both open and libre office. Plus libre office is a dumb name which I could ignore if it didn't suck.

I can see using OO or LO on linux because there aren't many options. For the Mac MS Office is key to widespread acceptance and very useful to the platform.

Keynote is the only clearly superior aspect of iWork over MS Office on the mac for business use.

It would be far better if Apple had ever released a Keynote player for windows.

If Apple had made Numbers like Lotus Improv then it would be far superior than excel for many business purposes. I never understood why it wasn't given it was a hit on NeXT and Jobs liked it.

They should have bought Quantrix (an improv like spreadsheet) and made that the basis of Number Pro IMHO.