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Microsoft Office for iPad and Android Phones

posted by GungnirSniper on Friday March 28 2014, @11:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the diversify-your-portfolio dept.

elgrantrolo writes:

With the iPad likely to be a top selling PC these days, this distinction in the computing world is likely to become less important, even more now that Microsoft announced the release of MS Office apps for Android phones and for the iPad. Some strings are attached to the Office365 SaaS, but overall, it looks like a significant step for Microsoft to be less reliant on the Windows OS.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by elgrantrolo on Saturday March 29 2014, @04:00AM

    by elgrantrolo (1903) on Saturday March 29 2014, @04:00AM (#22847) Journal

    This is not that new. Home computing influences work computing habits and vice versa. At the moment, the ease of use of iPad and Android are so significantly better than the traditional PC that people are quite enthusiastically adopting iPad for work. There is compromise but a decent one.

    I have only briefly used iPad but completely understand why people are enthusiastic about using it. Having SSD only for high end models was probably the worst thing that the traditional computer manufacturers have done. Now we have old PCs perceived as complex and slow, while tablets and phones are easy and powerful (2 cores and HD! wow! It's the SAME as a PC!)

    People with 10" tablets are taking them everywhere, with the expectation to use them for work and play, like the MS Surface ads suggest. I think that the Surface (Pro and RT) is a decent answer to what the iPad and Android tablets brought to the table, namely in showing that a Microsoft "ecosystem" does help getting good online services working across devices. It suffered a lot because of the delay to get them to the market and of course because Google, Samsung and Apple did amazingly well.

    As things are, I think that in 4 years or maybe a little more we'll look at the PC landscape and see the installed base looking something like 40% Android, 30% Microsoft, 25% Apple. The "PC" will just include more device types than desktop, laptop and tower form factors. There are downsides, but as with the "PC Era", they are more easily perceived by the SoylentNews crowd than by the ordinary buyer. Like it or not, we are in the "Cloud Era", and PCs are expected to work with an App Market, to have a lot of computing power delivered by the cloud services suppliers and to be DRM compliant.