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

Again with this shit

[war4peace]

TFA is riddled with retarded assumptions. Too many times have I seen things like "I think 30% of all people would buy it", based on muddy facts or even no facts at all. GAAAH!

Re:Again with this shit

[gl4ss]

about 1% would buy it... maybe they'd get more subs to office 365 or something..

but even with 1%.. if you count ios selling forever then they're losing an infinite amount of money!

Re:Again with this shit

[Sockatume]

Sixty dollars per copy. By Deus! It's full of nonsense.

Re:Again with this shit

[ackthpt]

Then let's consider Microsoft could actually produce office tools which make the best use of a Tablet or Smart Phone. I find their tools to be a challenge even with a keyboard and mouse - too much feature bloat.

Proactive respose

[Dexter Herbivore]

Surely the proactive response is to market the current generation product, while synergising a coordinated strategy towards pushing market share towards the new market paradigm?

I just gagged a little writing that.

Magic numbers

[OzPeter]

Didn't we just have a "Magic Numbers" article yesterday about how much OO is worth?

Think of the planet .. recycle the comments from the previous article:
OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office

Cloud v. Native

[Sabah Arif]

Microsoft would make a mistake by not providing some sort of native client for popular platforms. Accessing Office through a browser is fine for some but it requires a constant internet connection and can be less responsive than native code. If Microsoft forces iPad (and other tablet users) to use Office 365, they will be making a big usability sacrifice on behalf users that don't need or want it. Better to canibalize your own sales than to leave yourself exposed to competitors (ala iPod v. iPhone.)

I applaud Microsoft for this.

[Joce640k]

I applaud Microsoft for this. Using Office as a stick to try to force people into buying a tablet they don't want is a much better strategy than selling Office to people who actually want to buy it.

Re:I applaud Microsoft for this.

[theVarangian]

Businesswise, it may well be. Office on iPad could make a lot of money, true. But a successful alternative to the iPad, controlled by MS with an MS app store? That's a lot more money. If Microsoft are to rival Apple they need ever advantage they can get, and Office exclusivity is a big advantage.

And according to a recent /. article, if I could snare an asteroid, bring it into earth orbit and mine the sucker I'd be able to pocket $195 billion, if, if, if. Here's a few bit more supposition: Microsoft is not going to make a dent in Apple's share of the mobilem market much less Google's Android OS empire just like that ** snaps fingers **. The bigger threat is Google so another option would be to accept this reality and make tons of money backing Apple against Google by releasing MS office for iOS but not Android. That would hurt Google/Android in the enterprise market since you'd instantly have a cloud enabled Office suite that is cross platform over Windows, Windows Phone, OS x and iOS with native and web apps but not on Android. Google is the bigger threat, business is war, war creates odd alliances.

Locked Ecosystem

[fufufang]

Well, porting Office to iOS would potentially reduce the sale of Microsoft Surface. I reckon Microsoft want to have a firmer control of their users.

Full of assumptions...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

One of them is that someone would pay $60 for an iOS version of Microsoft office when there are capable software better suited for the iPad for around $10 per application and they are compatible with Office. Microsoft knows this and wisely licenses its file API instead of diminishing their brand.

Re:Why is it that iOS users would buy Office?

[obarthelemy]

I'm on Android, which offers several quite good Office suites as well, and use MS Office for work. 2 main issues with the Android office suites, probably the same as on iOS:

1- Features. I'm always missing something such as style sheets, smart headers/footers, outline mode, ... let alone macros which I don't use that much
2- Compatibility. Importing/exporting files always results in a few issues, not only for unsupported features of course, but also for supported ones that are just a bit off. As soon as you need to shuttle docs back and fort between true MS Office and some clone, headaches happen. Unluckily, the clones don't have a Windows version.

Re:People still buy Office?

[SJHillman]

We just switched from Open Office to MS Office 2010.
1 - It's generally more user-friendly for the tasks most of our users need to do
2 - It looks better, the interface is more aesthetic (surprisingly important when dealing with non-technical users)
3 - Easier to push out updates
4 - Better compatibility with outside vendors
5 - Better support

Microsoft Office is Overpriced

[tuppe666]

I had a little look at what office would cost me. £220($340) for the crippled version £389.99($605) for the full version. I have used LibreOffice(originally openoffice) and it even has advantages over Microsoft Office its not just bad value. Its insanely overpriced.

It breaks MS commandment #1

[h4rr4r]

This would violate MS commandment #1; Thou shalt never do anything that could threaten the MS desktop monopoly.