Microsoft Could Earn Billions From Office For iOS 188
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft is leaving billions of dollars on the table by not porting Office to the iPad, according to a new analyst report. That analyst, Morgan Stanley's Adam Holt, believes that Office for iOS would sell to approximately 30 percent of all iPad users; priced at $60 per copy, that comes to a grand total of $2.5 billion per year — minus Apple's cut of the revenues, of course. But does Microsoft actually want Office for iOS out there? It's not necessarily in the company's best interest to rush such a platform to market, even if billions of dollars potentially hang in the balance — it's too busy pushing Office as a cloud-based, OS-agnostic platform. And Microsoft has another reason, aside from pushing the cloud version of Office, to de-emphasize the prospect of its productivity software on iOS: In a bid to draw more customers to its new hardware, Microsoft preloaded its Surface RT tablets with Office; offering the software on a rival touch-screen would take a major selling point off the table."
Proactive respose (Score:5, Funny)
Surely the proactive response is to market the current generation product, while synergising a coordinated strategy towards pushing market share towards the new market paradigm?
I just gagged a little writing that.
Re:Again with this shit (Score:4, Funny)
about 1% would buy it... maybe they'd get more subs to office 365 or something..
but even with 1%.. if you count ios selling forever then they're losing an infinite amount of money!
Re:People still buy Office? (Score:1, Funny)
I've been using Open Office / Libre Office for at least 5 years now. It does more than I would ever need it to. Honestly... it has too much. So I don't see how there's even a market anymore for Microsoft Office, cloud or not.
I can see why you'd say that but, believe it or not, some of us have IT departments larger than our mom's basement.