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."

Comments

Broken anyway

[Geoffrey.landis]

I have to say, the more they update and revise Office, the more broken it seems.
Wouldn't it be nice if they fixed bugs and made it work better with each iteration, instead of worse?

Balmer must go

[peter303]

Only two MicroSoft products are making much money, And Balmer is strangling one of them by ignoring a huge market. Bill G & Steve J had a nice deal to port Office to Macs right after Steve returned.