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Microsoft Could Earn Billions From Office For iOS

Posted by Soulskill on from the only-if-they-knew-how-to-play-nice-with-others dept.

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."

3 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Broken anyway by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 1, Troll

    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?

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  2. Balmer must go by peter303 · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.

  3. Timothy D. Cook must go by tuppe666 · · Score: -1, Troll

    Bill G & Steve J had a nice deal to port Office to Macs right after Steve returned.

    ...that was when Apple was weak. Apple has a short time frame while it is dominant in the tablet space its market share already below 50%], before it moves into irrelevance. Apple with its large stockpiles of Cash...with no new products, reinventing the tired PC market...and that should have included an Office product, but it seems like Apple is content to let its whole company [and its brand] wither away on incremental improvements to its dated electronics products.

    In context to your quotes by the measure of a CEO its share value, Ballmer is doing an awful lot better than Cook