Posts in March 27, 2014

In 2014, we finally have Microsoft Office for the iPad.

At Satya Nadella's first Microsoft event and public appearance since being named CEO in February, the company announced its longstanding productivity suite for Windows will henceforth be available to use on Apple's family of tablets, including the iPad mini and full-size iPad (2, 4, or Air).

Microsoft Office is now a free download from the App Store, but only for viewing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. For creating and editing those documents, however, you'll need to pay for Microsoft's Office 365 service, which starts at $70 per year.

It was possible to use Microsoft Office on an iPad before today's announcement. Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers is a free app for those already paying for the service, which is a virtualized version of Office, albeit not exactly optimized for the iPad. Furthermore, there have been a handful of available third-party tools that similarly delivered a virtualized desktop version of the productivity suite on an iPad, but perhaps that's not the best way to interact with documents, since Office wasn't optimized for a smaller screen.

Now that Microsoft finally got its act together to bring a native version of Office to the iPad, it seems like many people that would have really needed this, oh, let's say two years ago, have already moved on to other apps, or have simply given up on waiting for such a development.

There have previously been, ahem, other numerous ways to access Office and Office-like services on the iPad. One of our favorites was the release of OnLive Desktop in 2012, which was a free virtualized version of Windows 7 that included Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint already installed. It didn't take long for that service to shut down, as is to expected for anyone violating Microsoft's terms of service, but now we have iPad Office, and here are five things to look forward to when it comes to that news.

• It's Free. Office for iPad is free, but for creating and editing documents, an Office 365 subscription is needed. Subscriptions start at $70 a year.
• Word, Excel And PowerPoint Are Included. More Microsoft apps are sure to come, but the powerhouse items are now there for the picking.
• Word Document Formatting is Fully Enabled. Everything Word users love is right there on the iPad app, including the toolbox ribbon at the top for all of one's needed features.
• Excel Includes Specialized Numeric Keypad. To keep formulas handy, Excel includes a special numeric keypad—just for the iPad.
• PowerPoint Laser! While doing a PowerPoint presentation on the iPad, touch and laser pointer will appear for that crucial stage-like performance ambiance.

Lead image by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite; right image courtesy of Reuters

Satya Nadella, five weeks into his new job as Microsoft's CEO, wants to wipe the slate clean. Or, at least, convince you that he can.

Even though he's a 22-year-old veteran of the software company, the view from the top is different, Nadella said Thursday morning at an event in San Francisco. Microsoft unveiled new cloud and mobile products, most notably a version of Microsoft Office for Apple's iPad.

"You see things from very fresh eyes, from a fresh perspective—you relearn the place," said Nadella.

And it makes a big statement that he said this in technology's new heartland, rather than summoning journalists and analysts to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Mobile And The Cloud

One key point Nadella is making within Microsoft is that cloud and mobile aren't two separate things—they're one and the same. Mobile devices are useless pieces of plastic and metal without cloud-delivered software and services to run. And the cloud is just code lying still on a server in a data center without devices to breathe life into.

Microsoft has a lot to prove in the cloud and mobile, where it has been slow to bring its core Office suite online and has struggled to gain market share in mobile devices. So under Nadella, it's pushing a new yet old strategy: making great software for any device.

It's new, because Microsoft has focused its efforts on selling a unified offering of operating system and applications, all from one company. That worked well up until the end of the last decade, when the rise of smartphones and tablets eroded its virtual lock on the market of computing devices.

It's old, because Microsoft was famous for making applications before it was known for operating systems. Microsoft Word for Mac came four years before Word for Windows, for example.

So Microsoft's old-but-new business of making applications for a wide range of operating systems is one way the company will find its way forward.

Managing The Cloud

The other way Microsoft will assert its relevance is by catering to information-technology professionals, who are increasingly allowing—or tolerating—the use of just about any device employees bring into the workplace. At the same time, they're still on the hook for keeping business data and documents secure and in the right hands.

Julia White, a Microsoft general manager in the Office division, showed a number of management and configuration tools that work to manage Android and IOS devices as well as ones running Windows. One linchpin is Azure Active Directory, a cloud-based login and identity service.

Nadella has talked up Azure Active Directory before, and the identity service could play a key part in Microsoft's attempts to appeal to IT professionals and app developers alike.

Beyond the wonky details of Azure Active Directory, it's important as a symbol inside and outside Microsoft: This is how the company can play on its historic strength selling to large organizations and -- For more information read the original article here.