Microsoft Reveals Office For The IPad

Not since that one fateful day when Sonic appeared on a Nintendo console, side by side with Mario for the first time, has a tech giant announced as stunning a diversification of their product as Microsoft’s overnight revelation that they’ll be releasing a version of their Office suite for the Apple iPad. Overnight, Microsoft revealed that after years of speculation, they will be porting their beloved word processing and spreadsheeting giant to an operating system that doesn’t start with Windows.


Satya Nadella, the newly installed chief executive officer at Microsoft, took the covers off the new system, which claims to be “touch first” and, perhaps most tellingly, demonstrated it on Apple’s iPad, and not on any of Microsoft’s fledgling Surface technology. The Surface was a notable absentee from a showcase that featured a range of different technologies from other companies.
The Office for iPad application will be a free app fundamentally, but if users want to do advanced things like create and edit documents, a paid subscription service will need to be utilised, rendering the whole “announcing it’s a free app” thing somewhat redundant.
Microsoft remains a giant in the field of global technology, but its staunchly PC-centric business models have grown increasingly constrictive in an increasingly cloud-based, mobile industry. Nadella’s new laid-back approach is said to have boosted confidence in Microsoft’s projected ability to stave off obsolescence.
Taking pages from the Book of Jobs, Nadella’s address was conducted at a casual pace, whilst wearing a simple black t-shirt and jeans. He even managed to throw in some geek jokes and a few lines of poetry from T.S. Eliot. You know what that means, right?
Photo: AFP via Getty Images.

via SMH.

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