Tablets hold great possibility for the use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other such Office Suites, and Microsoft needs to be ready for it, a senior Microsoft executive said.
In an interview to a website, Microsoft’s Office division president, Kurt DelBene, said, “I think it’s open as to whether we get to a point where people do long, rich editing on mobile devices.
So far, Microsoft has enjoyed a mostly dominant status in the office productivity market. It faced challenges in the form of OpenOffice or other alternatives such as Google Docs, but survived.
The company is yet to produce a tablet; while Apple’s iWork for example, which was released some time back, followed by the launch of iCloud, is set to take on Microsoft’s Office and Google Docs as well.
To some extent Android stands a better chance of capturing the market space related to office productivity software. While the standard has been set by Microsoft, the competition from Google Docs and iWork has been gathering momentum of late, and things can soon get dangerous for Microsoft.
Although the company has also showed Office on Windows 8 tablets, the interface remains typically old style – point and click. The Apple product, iWork, remains touch optimized, which is in tune with the times.
The only positive for Microsoft has been the availability of Office on Windows Phone 7 — a key feature of the platform. Microsoft’s OneNote is another positive which is increasingly being used by more and more users for taking notes. Apple’s iWork for iPad sets users back by $10, but once they have it on the iPad they can download it free on their iPhones.
Right now, iWork is great only for creating basic documents. Those who have been using ‘Documents To Go’ on Android, must have noticed that new Android devices come armed with QuickOffice Viewer App which supports Google Docs and Dropbox as well.