Doug's Mailbag: Office's Possible Jump to the iPad
Readers react to the idea of Microsoft porting Office to Apple's tablet:
"This iPad user says Yes to an Office version! I have a good Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, so I can get real work done on it."
-Keith
"If I was Microsoft, and I was making an iPad version of Office, I'd at least wait until Windows 8 Tablets are released. I mean, if you're going to run Office on a device with a crappy keyboard, it may as well be a Windows tablet, right? Anyway, isn't there an App for that?"
-Dan
Microsoft wants to be the leader. So I would suppose it would prefer to have an Office version for the Windows (8) tablet. But Office is a cash generator so it should develop an iPad version ASAP.
-Jacobo
Did you seriously think Hyper-V coming to Windows 8 was only for their desktop, mobile and smartphone solution set? Why not build a Hyper-V solution for iPad that will run native Office and Office365 that looks like an iPad app, smells like an iPad app and feels like an iPad app? If you're going to go to all the trouble to scale Windows 8 down for less-capable and more power-efficient processors, why not REALLY put a dent in VMWare by making Hyper-V the multi-platform lynchpin of its strategy and letting its premier productivity app run with a ubiquitous abstraction layer instead of porting the app itself, which you point out would be a pretty tough nut to crack anyway?
-Richard
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/07/2011 at 1:18 PM