In all the speculation that preceded Microsoft’s recent release of Office 2013, one of the most hotly debated rumors was that Microsoft would be announcing a version of Office for the iPad. Even with the debut of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, analysts said Microsoft couldn’t possibly afford to ignore the massive iOS user base.
They were wrong.
When asked point blank by Bloomberg Businessweek, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a terse answer to the question of when we can expect an iPad version for Office: “I have nothing to say on that topic. … We do have a way for people always to get to Office through the browser, which is very important.”
Clearly, Steve Ballmer has never tried taking his own advice. While InfoWorld notes that the cloud-based version of Microsoft Office is somewhat improved, it’s still not a really workable solution for iPad users.
The most obvious limitation of Ballmer’s workaround is the lack of off-line access. If you need to work on one of your documents while you’re without Internet access, well, tough.
And if you want to print, well, there’s a “workaround” for that, too. You’ll have to basically “print” your document to a PDF and then print the PDF.
(Meanwhile, Android users like me are just plain out of luck on all counts, since the web apps are basically unusable on the Chrome browser.)
All in all, it looks like Microsoft Office may be going the way of the dinosaur. By going all protectionist on non-Surface tablet users, Microsoft has tied itself to the shrinking PC market and is headed for irrelevance.
Users who need a better workaround than the one Steve Ballmer has offered would be wise to check out better products offered by other companies, including the popular (and still free) CloudOn app .
(photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/7118787133/)
Deborah Savadra is editor and chief blogger at Legal Office Guru, which offers The WordPerfect Lover's Guide to Word as well as Microsoft Office video tutorials. You can follow her on Twitter at @legalofficeguru.
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If Microsoft Office is going to ignore the iPad, I’m just going to go ahead and ignore Microsoft Office.
Yea good luck with that.
completely agree with you, I think most iPad users will do this too. Ignore us at your peril Microsoft!
I don’t do heavy-duty word processing, with extensive formatting or anything like that, so your results may vary… but I’ve found that the iOS Pages app does a pretty good job of opening up and working with Word documents. I personally couldn’t care less that Microsoft doesn’t want to play nice. I’ll be just as happy to use their competitor’s product.
Apple also has to learn to open their architecture. BTW I have a iPod Torch that Apple is making obsolete by upgrading the iOS and removing my apps.
I hope Office isn’t going to go away. I love my ipad and use it for certain things, but our main document creation/editing is done in Word. I think it would be much harder to do that on an iPad. The idea of formatting tables in a brief on an ipad is really scary.
I’m still holding out hope (against all evidence) that Microsoft will come to its senses sometime this year. Given how dismal the Windows 8 release turned out to be, I don’t think Microsoft can afford to write off a huge potential market like that.
I really wish lawyers would stop being so slow to move on to new technology. Word hasn’t been good for many, many, many years (I think Word 5.1 was the last decent version). It is an awful, bloated….just terrible. I cringe every time I have to dust it off b/c some lawyer sent me some Word document with funky formatting that one of my other text editors / word processors is having difficulty translating.
MSFT has had more than its fair share of second chances. I actually really wanted their tablet to be a good competitor. But it isn’t. It’s terrible.
Balmer is like the kid who is working as hard as he can to drive Daddy’s business into the ground. This is just another silly, spiteful decision that will end up costing MSFT in the long run.
Interesting how aggressive MSFT has been this week — after this news from Ballmer, and the attack ads on Google/Gmail (“I’m getting screw-gled!”), you have to wonder how much of this aggression stems from worry.
I’m actually bullish on MSFT because they still have hands-down the best professional utility suite in Office: I am an Excel and Powerpoint power-user, in spite of the free and cloud-accessible nature of Google Docs, Prezi, etc. Steve Jobs is dead, and I don’t know what the future of the iPad is, but I don’t think it’s going Mini — AAPL product feels rudderless right now.
If I were Ballmer, I’d be balls out as well.
I agree with you Amro…
You think MS Office is going the way of the dinosaur? What planet do you live on?
I do not think the intension of say “MS Office is going the way of the dinosaur” is that the apps have fallen down in capabilities. Its just that MS leadership is not focusing on the entire globe anymore. This leave room for new competition to grab real-estate faster.
The technology revolution has been through the generation “X” and “Y” and more recently generation “Free”. We are now in the “Now” generation where peoples attention is narrow and patience is limited. If MS waits too long they will lose their future customers.
@zac if you were using MS Office it would have your grammar mistakes!! the correct word was intention. not intension
If you were using it, it would have notified you that showed you were missing the word “corrected” between have/ your, would have Capitalized the first letter of the next sentence, and added a period at the end. Just sayin’…
*”intention”
MS is focusing on “producers” as well as “consumers” with its products!! Can’t say the same for the iToys out there. The gen y, and free’s and now’s can all carry on consuming on an iToy while the real contibutors in the world will carry on making making money from them by producing with non-AAPL products.
Simple!
The one where technology is changing at an alarming pace and where non-innovators get eaten for lunch.
@EEAC If you’re going to be picky, then ‘intension’ is a spelling mistake whereas “@zac if you were using MS Office it would have your grammar mistakes!! the correct word was intention. not intension” is one large grammer mistake.
@Grammer Man – Similarly, “grammer” is one large spelling mistake.
The one that’s FAR FAR AWAY… ? They’ve been saying that about MS since Novell was king and where are they now. How many Apple PCs litter corporate desktops? How many product lines does MS hav;, how many does Apple have? Who’s the inovator!
Last time I looked most of Apple’s toys are designed to lower your driving skills.
The other day I had an energy drink that was not a Red Bull. I had become so accustomed to drinking Red Bulls that drinking anything-but one seemed odd. After I had finished it, and then on another occasion having another alternative, I thought to myself: this is how it used to be! I used to enjoy experimenting with different drinks. Sure, I enjoyed RB, and that’s probably why I made it a habit, but something was lost when I stuck to it exclusively. I think the same came be said with word processing. Microsoft no longer has anything near a monopoly on word processing and the file format – at all. Back in the 90s, people really enjoyed experimenting with different word processors – sure, Word was the best. Maybe, we can go back to this type of stage, where people can be resourceful and happily experimental on their own. No Word on iPad? So?
lol, microsoft isn’t going to become a ‘dinosaur’. I feel like everyone talking like this has no clue about what people all over the world use. word & microsoft are still so dominant. I
‘m not saying they shouldn’t do more to improve. I just think it’s gonna take a lon gtime for them to go away.
Nothing yet rival Excel’s higher functionality. I hear that if you learn PHP and MySQL you can recreate Excel’s functionality but how many Excel users are up for chasing curly brackets?
I don’t know about all of Microsoft, but I can say that Excel 2013′s improvements are hardly dinosaur.
Also, we don’t know the WHY behind MicroSoft saying “no” to the ipad. Might it be something on Apple’s side of the equation that made MicroSoft say “no”?
I agree, Microsoft office suite offers the most functionality… but I’d also argue that the more advanced functionality that it offers exclusively is stuff that the average joe just doesn’t need in the first place. I’ve been without Office for years now, and even my most complex budgeting spreadsheets full of basic formulas and academic papers are working just fine in the iWork suite. (And that includes on the iPad!) If Office offers me more functionality I don’t really care, because it’s functionality that I really don’t need.
It’s like saying we should all be driving racecars because they handle better and go faster than your standard sedan. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean we need it.
Ellie really nails the crux of the issue I think. Excel IS a deeper product. If you need pivot tables and such then you still need to use Excel. But for most lawyers, Apple’s Numbers or Google Docs has all the features you need, is more collaborative, more mobile and much much easier to work with. Same for MS Word. MSFT’s goal is to include every feature that anyone could possibly ever want or need. This is great if you are the 2% that needs some of the more arcane features but results in a cumbersome, bloated experience if you are a normal 98% user.
As for Powerpoint…well Powerpoint is a joke compared to Keynote or other competitors. I don’t see how anyone serious about their presentation would use it.
@sunanda — I know MS Office is the current “standard.” That’s why I have an entire site dedicated to it. But I also understand that, as the tablet market evolves and people (especially in the legal field) expect to be productive anywhere and on multiple devices, protectionist tactics like Microsoft’s are suicidal. To me, if a large group of customers tells you they want and need “X”, why would you tell them (if not in so many words) they don’t know what they’re talking about?
@Deborah – you said “To me, if a large group of customers tells you they want and need “X”, why would you tell them (if not in so many words) they don’t know what they’re talking about?”
This has been Apple’s modus operandi since its inception. Apple supplys to the market what Apple wants to supply. Not what the market wants.
Why is MS’s stance any different?
That’s exactly the answer I was looking for. I’d like a cheap mouse and keyboard for a MacBook, but Apple forces me to buy only sheet they make. Or I’d like them blue, pink and with little lights on them. On a PC I can do that, on a Mac I can’t because of that stupid Apple behavior that doesn’t let a user choose.
Microsoft, on the other way, was always taking into consideration the opinion of their users. Have you heard about MS Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com/)? It’s their way of getting ideas, improvements or even bugs from customers. They were always connecting better with their users than Apple did. Let’s talk only about old versions compatibility in almost any MS software, which is a way of MS respecting their users.
You obviously haven’t tried to use a MAC in about 10-15 years because Apple allows all kinds of keboards, mice ( I used a MS mouse for years –with no special drivers needed), printers, cameras, scanners etc. I find that most things work “plug and play”.
Meanwhile, I use a company-provided (HP) Win 7 PC and have experienced strange usability issues and functions that just don’t work as good as on my personal MAC, namely the sound volume, the graphics brightness controls and very inconsistent trackpad gesture support even though I always load the latest drivers and updates from HP and MS.
This kind of argument is pointless because you would rather buy a PC and in most cases I would rather buy a MAC (limiting the choices of hardware that an OS has to deal with does limit a few of the SNAFUs).
Just try to stick to the current facts. Yeah MACs cost more to buy; and I maintain they cost less to KEEP.
There is OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Any issues with using either with iPad? MS no longer dominates the world~ neither does T.Rex
No no. I doubt that OpenOffice an LibreOffice have pivot charts, slicers, and VBA.
Actually, Libre Office does have pivot charts. There is free iPad app- AstralPad, that is based on LibreOffice and allows you to edit MS office documents beautifully. Check it out.
Disclaimer: I am the developer of AstralPad app.
Can’t say I blame Microsoft. Apple has continued to swallow up , shut out, disallow or severely charge many other software developers to the point where it’s becoming a real monopoly. While the rate of Windows users is shrinking, eventually Microsoft will only have the Office Suite left to offer while everyone converts to Apple . However, if they make a stand like Apple does on its own software, they can still sell the Windows platform to the many businesses that depend on Office. Becoming a dinosaur? Hardly. It’s exactly what Apple has been doing since the 90s. If anything, they need to continue this move, make new compelling packages, or partnering up with other software giants like Adobe to create entirely Windows-only systems.
Word and PowerPoint are polished, mature products. They are the standard in their respective categories. However, relatively speaking, they are simple and many competing products have comparable capabilities. The one product that is unequaled by anything else in any other category of desktop software is Excel. Yes, there are other spreadsheet programs and to the majority of users they won’t notice much difference in feature sets between them. However, if you are an Excel power user and do any kind of serious analytics or reporting on big business data, scientific data, or any other complex data sets, then you know Excel has no spreadsheet equal. It’s not even close. The world’s businesses run on Excel. It is basically its own platform for building reports and interactive applications. If you just need to maintain lists in a spreadsheet, then open office or google apps will suffice, but if you want to crush numbers and do mind blowing analytics, and display the results in an interactive dashboard. Excel stands alone in desktop software. Due to Excel, more so than any other Office app, Office as a whole is not going anywhere soon. Nobody is doing serious work on an iPad anyway at this point.
Great point. People use Excel for managing tables which can be done elsewhere but anytime you want to collect data and analyze it, 95% of the time, that’s still Excel.
Microsoft doesn’t owe apple users office and why should they you apple followers have jumped in bed with the worst self serving grossly egotistical company in the world and I wouldnt take an ipad if it was free the company sickens me…
Yes, because Microsoft has a tremendous history of avoiding hubris and being benign? Need I remind you of winning things like Vista and Win ME? How about their abuses with IE? The hosing they gave consumers with the Xbox360 when it was released?
Yes, true, but they have been very nice at least the last six years. They’ve even been getting “awards” for being the most ethical company etc. They’ve also release documentation on all their protocols and formats + contributing to open source and even open sourcing some their own software/libraries. Many don’t know this, but MS is responsible for a great deal of innovations to the PC platform itself, and this is given for free to the OEMs (of course, to strengthen the PC market). Their new ARM platform is an example of that. Also, they contribute to a lot of standards and specifications.
Btw, Vista and WinME have nothing to do with being nice or not. While WinME did crash for many users, including me (at least two blue screens a week), it was indeed faster than Win 98 SE and brought system restore and other stuff to the table.
Vista was “bad” because it demanded a lot resources, especially memory, and many old apps lost compatibility and stopped working. 85% of this was remedied with SP1. Vista became a usable OS after that.
Fyi: IE6 was the best browser when it got released. It had the best CSS support and included the most features. IE has had all these CSS3 features we’re getting now for over 13 years. Gradients, rotate, vector drawings, etc. – it was all possible with IE6. A lot of it weren’t standards, granted, but most were submitted to be a standard. The W3C didn’t like VML though, so it merged it with some other technologies like PGML and so SVG was born.
So, the only thing we can hate Microsoft for with IE is being slow to release IE7 and getting to where they are now with IE10 (which is great!).
The iPad is a great toy, but you can get work on done on a Windows 8 device.
I’ll keep my toy, but moving to a Windows 8 device is a no-brainer for me.
In the face of the Apple tidlewave, what MSFT have put together is very impressive indeed. They have
- an operating system built for mobile and office use
- the killer product suite for, and adopted by, business
- a staggeringly good cloud hosting / developer environment in Windows Azure
- a huge global developer network on the BizSpark programme
- a very decent first entry into the hardware market.
I wouldn’t eat my hat if it isn’t the iPad that ends up in Jurassic Park…
As MD points out above, I feel similarly about PowerPoint. Imagine on any given day in how many offices there are people busily putting presentations together using the standard. It will take a huge shift for people to stop using PowerPoint. Not having it on the iPad isn’t going to make it go away. Also, with the new breed of tablet/laptop hybrid units coming out that run all Windows apps and operate like a true multi-tasking computer the reign of the iPad could be shorter than we think.
Interesting. So Microsoft business is driven by Ballmer’s emotional ego rather than customer need and marketing analytics. We all know where this leads to. Bill, watch out how your baby is being treated!
“They were wrong.” Incorrect conclusion. The analysts said MS could not afford to ignore the iPad. That they did does NOT in any way, shape or form make he analysts wrong, because that will only be proven once we see what consequences MS will face because of this decision. Please stick to writing about conclusions that are supported by simple, grade school logic.
@Juan – The sentence “[t]hey were wrong” refers to the conclusion that an Office for iPad app was imminent and inevitable.
For some people, technology is the hardware, when in fact the technological creation comming from software, hardware exchange every 3 months, software evolves …
Some products are for domestic use and behave as accessory to the style of dress of the people , other professional help in productivity.
I’m amazed the Ballmer has packaged the message so friendly. iPad is such a piece of image junk that it is not worth the while to produce a version for it.
Deborah should give the surface a try and then would realize that she’s got the whole dinosaur thing wrong, completely wrong. As a matter of fact I’m amazed that Apple dares to bring out a new iPad which is still the same as the old iPad, without learning that the tablet world as they know it is dying.
Deborah, by the way, if you haven’t been sleeping the last few months, Microsoft is the one who is not sleeping. Congratulations Micorsoft to a Surface product, which is miles ahead of most of the competition, especially iPad.
It always surprises me how hostile Microsoft fans get about Apple products.
I could go into a diatribe about how Microsoft fans are just tired of having the same pieces of hardware crammed in our grille for years, but I don’t need to.
From a business perspective, I can’t even remotely fathom anyone using the iPad as a serious business tool anyway – it’s just a giant iPhone with no voice calling functionality.
Call me old fashioned but I prefer my scaled down productivity hardware to still be a computer. Maybe one day Apple will realize this and build an iPad with OS X?
If you want to use office have an PC dont have a MAC!! You have a MAC and then want to use the app of windows… lol.. must be.. Why should they do something for MAC?? They do for themselves if MAC want to have something as good as the office they can always do… but until now they dont seem very interested in doing so
I don’t know if you see whats going on with the competition between the three giants at the IT industry right now, Microsoft, Apple and Google… but such decision makes sense. Apple and Google are fighting Microsoft for several years back by clearly doing dirty work behind scenes (the same way politics is done), while Microsoft was still releasing its best products for other platforms in order to satisfy all customers. Now it turned out that using Microsoft’s best products, these competitors (especially Google) became popular and immediately after getting high on the list, they are ignoring and even blocking Microsoft. Therefore, why Microsoft would release its best products for iPad, Android or any other device from a competitors who do everything to destroy Microsoft? Yes, most of those using iPad would say there is option “better” than Office… ok, go on with that ;)
If you install the terminal App ‘OnLive Desktop’, however, then you have full access to the office suite, and more.
iPad just isn’t a serious enough business tool to cause any worry of that nature for MSFT. People who don’t use Office are a minority in the business world at least. Who wants to reinvent that wheel? I mean, come on.
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