Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 12:37 am

iPad + Office + Apple + Microsoft: Why It All Makes Sense

In case you missed the craziness this week, Microsoft appears to be making some Office apps for the iPad. Or maybe it’s not. Or whatever. MG Siegler has a good wrapup of the nonsense here.

Office for the iPad makes total sense, though. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did give Microsoft some stage time to unveil it at the new-iPad event in a few weeks.

Why should Microsoft do this? The iPad is clearly a huge hit. Microsoft feels it. And Microsoft, still arguably the world’s most important software company, would be foolish to ignore this opportunity.

This isn’t like when Microsoft had to scratch and think before making Office for the Mac in the ’90s, when it would be lucky to sell a couple million copies per year. The iPad is way different: It should easily pass 50 million unit sales this year alone, and that’s potentially tens of millions of Office buyers for Microsoft. (Office, by the way, represented significantly more of Microsoft’s sales and profits last quarter than Windows.)

And while the economics for selling Office for the iPad are going to be different than selling it for Windows or Mac, that’s just the way things are going — that can’t stop Microsoft.

What about Windows tablets? What about Windows tablets? If Office is the only thing worth buying a Windows tablet for, no one’s going to want to buy a Windows tablet. Microsoft needs to give people many more reasons than Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to buy Windows tablets. So selling Office for the iPad shouldn’t get in the way of that. And anyway, it will be many years — if ever — before Windows tablets are selling in nearly the volume that iPads are. ”Sitting out” the iPad could actually become a real risk for Microsoft and the future of the Office business.

Why should Apple give Microsoft a hand? Because being able to say “the iPad runs Word” is a bigger deal than you think. For consumers, for kids, for Walt Mossberg, and especially for corporations. Apple is trying to sell the enterprise on the iPad, and I’d be shocked if many big corporations didn’t at least think they needed real Office support on the iPad to justify the leap. They may never use it once they’ve purchased it. But checking that box is important.

What about iWork? What about iWork? It’s decent, maybe, but it’s no Office. Heck, even on the Mac, there are plenty of reasons to keep Word and Excel around if you handle those types of files in your line of work. (I try to do all of my spreadsheets in Numbers, but I still have to keep Excel open pretty much all of the time.)

Anyway, iWork doesn’t make Apple any money — selling iPads makes Apple money. So if supporting and promoting Office and iWork apps helps sell iPads, then Apple would be stupid not to. (Especially if Apple can also get Microsoft to do Office for the Mac App Store, add iCloud sync support, etc.) It’s the same reason Apple gave Netflix and Reed Hastings some stage time: Because even if it’s hurting iTunes a tiny bit, it’s helping sell iPads and Apple TVs, and that’s what matters.

Anyway, enough of this. Now you must watch this hilariously bad/great video that Microsoft made to discredit Google Apps/Docs for enterprise users. (Via Daring Fireball.) Clearly, Microsoft cares about remaining the go-to Office suite. To do that, though, it must now support the iPad.

Also: Why Microsoft will inevitably try to buy Nokia or RIM

  • Follow @SplatF on Twitter or RSS for the latest.

New! Comments are welcome but moderated. Please read the Commenting Guide first.

  • http://www.postlinearity.com gregorylent

    why use an ipad if one has a macbook air? just because of the lid?

    ipad is useless for so many production tasks, including writing. it is still a novelty toy.

    but i understand your point, it’s about the fact that sales will happen, so grab the money.

    • http://www.fromedome.com/ Dan Frommer

      Well, for one, it’s half the price, so if you’re outfitting a force of 10,000 people or whatever, you’re saving half the money.
      And not all tasks are writing based, or even “productivity”-based. Opening a document, seeing that something’s there, maybe tweaking a few things and sending it back is a big part of this sort of stuff, I’d imagine. I don’t expect tablets to become full-on “work” machines, but for a lot of tasks, they can be adequate.
      (And for many other tasks, especially where touch or elegance or simplicity are helpful, they can outperform laptops.)
      Anyway, almost three times more iPads were sold than Macs last quarter. I think that’s what matters.

      • http://twittercism.com Sheamus

        Pages on the iPad can open and edit Word docs, and the other iWork iPad apps can do the same thing with their Office counterparts. Having Word on your iPad wouldn’t make this an easier – as a huge iPad fan, it’s still a bit of a clunky affair, especially when you need to do major edits. 

        I take your point about a workforce, and an iPad will do the job if you don’t have a second, better choice, but any major typing work will always need a keyboard of some kind, even if it’s a bluetooth bolt on. Which means you need to be sitting down, which means you might as well use your laptop. On occasion I write blog posts on my iPad, but it’s usually only because I have to. It’s certainly not as good as an experience as on my Macbook Pro, say. And I’m not sure it ever will be, nor that it’s try to be an all-things device.

        Here’s the trillion dollar question: is “adequate” good enough for most people, and most companies? Maybe.While it’s nice to support the biggest products, I’m not sure it’s as big a deal as you think for Apple, nor sales of the iPad, who got by just fine by ignoring Flash and a ton of other major software tools.It would be, however, a very big deal for Microsoft. What will be interesting is how it’s priced. Office isn’t cheap, but Apple’s iWork products are VERY cheap on the iPad. If they don’t get that right, it might not matter at all.

  • jgrclarke

    I’m perplexed by the constant refrain of “useless for production tasks” – to borrow Jobs’ analogy, it’s like dismissing a Honda Civic because you can’t take the hogs to market. I expect the limitations you are aluding to are in professional level media-production, coding or other things far beyond my ability.

    That being said, I’m a partner in a international law firm, and have to travel quite a bit. I no longer bring a laptop with me. The only slightly missing piece for me with an iPad has been that all documents in the legal/business world are in Word (and highly formatted, which creates incompatibility issues between versions of Word, but never mind…). At this time, the core “production” of the agreements we draft have to be on a Window’s computer (usuallly a desktop), and are usually completed by an assistant or secretary. Nevertheless, I still read and comment on all of my normal workflow – and can do so in an airport lounge or on holiday, using a 3G network. Battery life matters.

    Don’t get me wrong, I covet my daughter’s Macbook Air, but while my firm has recently added full work email capability for iOs devices (my Blackberry hasn’t been charged for weeks), they won’t support Macbooks or iMacs. The iPad and iPhone are past the IT department’s gates and rummaging through the corporate world’s cupboards

  • http://kaizenity.blogspot.com/ FalKirk

    First, I am not as certain as you that Office would sell tens of millions of copies. More on that later. But even if office did sell that well, 10,000,000 copies at $20 per sale times 70% equals 140 million dollars. That’s chicken feed to Microsoft.

    Second, while I agree with you that Office is not powerful enough to sell Window 8 tablets by itself, it still may give Microsoft a sales edge. And Window 8 tablets need every edge they can get. Why throw away any advantage for a paltry 140 million dollars in iPad App sales?Third and finally, would Office on the ipad be the big seller that everyone seems to assume?While its true that many big corporations still think they need Office to do “real work” on a tablet, they might just change that opinion once a tablet version of Office hits the market. Office on the iPad would inevitably be a very different animal than Office on the desktop. What special advantage would it really have? Is Office really necessary or do people only THINK that it’s necessary? Once buyers have a chance to compare the Office reality to the Office hype, they might just realize that Office on the tablet is no more special – and no more necessary – than a variety of already existing iPad Apps. 

    • http://www.fromedome.com/ Dan Frommer

      Fair points.

      I agree that the economics of tablet apps (and, perhaps even worse for Microsoft, tablet OSes) are relatively lousy compared to desktop PCs. But what’s the alternative? Letting someone else take that market completely?

      • http://kaizenity.blogspot.com/ FalKirk

        “what’s the alternative?”-Dan Frommer

        Frankly, I don’t think it much matters what Microsoft does with Office on the tablet because I don’t think that Office on the tablet is going to matter the way most others do.

        But Microsoft can’t take that approach. They’ve got to leverage Office for all its worth. In my opinion – and I would think it would be Microsoft’s opinion too – Office is worth far more in increased Window 8 tablet sales than it is as merely 1 App among 500,000 in the Apple App Store.

  • http://kaizenity.blogspot.com/ FalKirk

    The iPad is very good at some things and not so very good at others. If I were creating a top ten list of things the tablet form factor did not inherently do well, I would probably include (in no particular order) word processing and spreadsheets. And what are the cornerstones of Microsoft Office? Wouldn’t that be Word and Excel?

    Microsoft Office on tablets is not going to be anywhere near as important as people think it will be.

    • http://stephenrice.eu Stephen Rice

      On the other hand, I think Access on iPad would rock.

  • Jay Martin

    I love hearing all the comments claiming that the iPad isn’t good for “real work”. It reminds me of a very similar claim many years ago: you can do “real work” better when you don’t have a GUI in the way. Keyboards are much more efficient than mice and all that GUI stuff.

    The more things change the more they stay the same…

    • wanorris

      It depends on what you’re doing. Taking notes in meetings, replying to emails, and reading occasional Word docs on an iPad is a totally reasonable workflow.

      By contrast, working all day in spreadsheets using a 10″ screen with an on-screen keyboard that makes the part of the spreadsheet you can see even smaller is really dumb. Doing software development on a single small screen with an onscreen keyboard instead of a setup of multiple large monitors is dumb too. And it’s pretty questionable whether most people would want to write a novel or screenplay or something on an iPad screen as opposed to a laptop keyboard/In some ways, it’s sort of a next evolutionary step from switching to a laptop. For some people, switching to a laptop for work is a no-brainer. But for other types of work, it takes away important capabilities of a desktop computer that users need that don’t fit into a small package.

      • http://stephenrice.eu Stephen Rice

        Absolutely. A lot of bandwidth could be saved if people just accepted that not everyone does the same things with their computers.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697031745 Linden Roberts

    So long as they make it work with Dropbox it’ll be a success.