Microsoft announces Office for iPad, brings knife to gun fight

For Microsoft, a free app for viewing and presenting Office docs for iPad is a big deal. For the rest of the technology world, not so much.

Today Microsoft announced they were bringing Office to the iPad. As well as being the end of a “will they/won’t they” saga to rival Ross and Rachel, it is Microsoft ‘s new CEO, Satya Nadella, stepping across the line that former CEO Steve Ballmer drew and refused to cross.

But it may be a step in the wrong direction.

Office for iPad is split into three apps; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. These apps are free to download from the App Store now. Open them, try to make a new document and you are greeted with this:

Office is still the de facto productivity suite for most people, but more and people are hearing about and switching to free alternatives; Google has its web-based Drive, and Apple recently released its iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) for free for new Mac and iOS customers.

Microsoft wants people to use Office 365 over other cloud-connected offerings, but as it is wont to do, it want’s to charge for that connectivity, even for the average consumer.

And lo, we have this; a suite of iPad apps that are useless if you don’t fully buy in to Microsoft’s ecosystem. And no-one wants to pay £8 a month for the same connectivity that Apple and Google are giving away for free.

Even just charging for the apps standalone would entice more long-term users (people are used to paying for Office), but the average consumer will download this, try it out and immediately delete it when they realise they can’t actually use it without paying for something they don’t really want.

Microsoft will continue to get the bulk of its money from businesses, most of whom appreciate these features, but will also to continue to lose its consumer base to its rivals.

And eventually those businesses will switch to those rivals as those rivals encroach on Microsoft’s hallowed grounds of security and enterprise features.