Billions on ‘The’ tablet: Why Microsoft’s Office for iOS is coming soon

“CNNMoney.com has a story making the rounds this morning that quotes a Morgan Stanley analyst who says that Microsoft is potentially making a very costly mistake by not offering an iPad version of Office. ‘Two and a half billion dollars. That’s how much Morgan Stanley’s Adam Holt estimates Microsoft may be leaving on the table by not offering a full version of its Office suite (Word, Excel, etc.) on Apple’s iPads,’” Greg Bussmann writes for The St. Louis Social Media and Tech Report.

“The only problem with this is that, by all accounts, Microsoft is going to release a version of Office for the iPad,” Bussmann writes. “The analyst may be seizing on a recent ‘no comment’ Steve Ballmer issued when asked specifically about it, but there is pretty good indication that Office for iOS will be here soon.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Oh, no, Microsoft. You don’t want to release Office for iOS. Remember, that would kill your Surface sales, not to mention further obliterate Windows-licensed PC sales as those who think they need Office opt for iPads. No, stay away from that nasty iPad, protect your Surface tablets and Windows PCs!

Microsoft Support Site Leaks References to Office for iOS

There’s been a lot of hubbub about whether or not Microsoft is actually planning on releasing an iOS version of its Office productivity suite. The Daily insisted we would see Office for the iPad in early 2012, but the software never materialized, and since then, all we’ve heard is rumor after rumor.

Today French site Mac4Ever discovered some hints of Office for iPad that are a little more concrete. Microsoft’s French support site contains several references to Office Mobile for iPhone, Excel for iPad, and Power Point for iPad, in the form of accidentally or incorrectly applied product tags.

The French version of an article entitled “Custom Numeric Formants for the FORMAT function,” for example, has the tag Excel for iPad applied. The U.S. version of this help document lists only Excel 2013 and PowerPivot in Excel 2013 as tags, suggesting that the iPad tag has been mistakenly linked to the wrong product on the French side.

The existence of the tags on the official French Microsoft site suggests that Microsoft is indeed working on a version of Office for iOS. The tags don’t hint at a possible release date or reveal any other information, but we do know now that the project exists, at least in some capacity.

[via MacRumors]