Microsoft Could Earn Billions From Office For iOS

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."

Full of assumptions...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

One of them is that someone would pay $60 for an iOS version of Microsoft office when there are capable software better suited for the iPad for around $10 per application and they are compatible with Office. Microsoft knows this and wisely licenses its file API instead of diminishing their brand.

Re:Why is it that iOS users would buy Office?

[obarthelemy]

I'm on Android, which offers several quite good Office suites as well, and use MS Office for work. 2 main issues with the Android office suites, probably the same as on iOS:

1- Features. I'm always missing something such as style sheets, smart headers/footers, outline mode, ... let alone macros which I don't use that much
2- Compatibility. Importing/exporting files always results in a few issues, not only for unsupported features of course, but also for supported ones that are just a bit off. As soon as you need to shuttle docs back and fort between true MS Office and some clone, headaches happen. Unluckily, the clones don't have a Windows version.

Microsoft Office is Overpriced

[tuppe666]

I had a little look at what office would cost me. £220($340) for the crippled version £389.99($605) for the full version. I have used LibreOffice(originally openoffice) and it even has advantages over Microsoft Office its not just bad value. Its insanely overpriced.