A lot of noise was made last week about Nintendo getting pressured by investors to bring its games to the iOS platform. It’s pretty clear that the market for stand-alone portable gaming devices is toast, and Nintendo needs to make some tough (ego-shattering) choices.
Another iconic brand that needs to swallow its pride is Microsoft. What, besides ego, could possibly explain why Microsoft’s Office suite of apps is not on the App Store, after the iOS platform has been around for three years now?
Microsoft’s biggest cash cows are Windows and Office, two products that are made for the PC. While the PC may have a longer shelf-life than the portable gaming devices, the trajectory of the PC industry has clearly been altered by the iPad.
Microsoft has its own controversial (in my opinion stupid) “hybrid” idea of how a tablet should be, which we’ll see with Windows 8. But in the meantime, why doesn’t Microsoft hedge its bets and try to assert its dominance in the iOS platform?
While Microsoft is twiddling its thumbs in Redmond, Apple’s office productivity apps (Numbers, Pages, Keynote) have a Microsoftian monopoly on the most exciting new platform in computing in the last 30 years.
The most puzzling thing is it’s not as though Microsoft is against iOS development as a whole; two examples of (actually cool) Microsoft apps on iOS are PhotoSynth and Bing.
So why not make a really basic port of Office, with just the core features? I guarantee it would be among the top business apps no matter how horrid it was. I have used enough Office for Mac versions to know that Microsoft doesn’t need to make a quality software product to be successful. Ask any Mac user–every Office for Mac product  that has every been released is a disgrace. Bloated and slow, I still see bugs in the Office apps that I recall from back in the days of using Word on my Performa.
So why do 90% (made up number, but probably pretty close) of Mac users have Office installed? Simple: because they have to have it installed. If you do any kind of business which requires you to share documents with other users, you have to use the standard–which as of now is Office (.docx, xlsx, pptx). Turning in a Keynote file to a client just isn’t going to cut it. Apple’s and others’ apps have porting options to Office formats, but the inconsistencies in format and the extra hoop to jump through make this a non-starter to the vast majority of computer users.
There is a clear demand for Office on the iPad. A search for “Microsoft” on the iPad App Store brings in many different deceptive apps with the Office logos (X, W or O), which actually just turn out to be “guide books” or how-tos about the desktop versions of the Office suite. Even though the descriptions for these apps don’t lie about what they are, they have deceptively high prices and icons that suggest they are more than just books. Invariably, they all have horrible reviews of people claiming they were duped and requesting their money back (on a side-note, this is surprising to see in Apple’s tightly controlled App Store, and seems to be the kind of thingyou’d hear about in the Android Market).
It’s been hard to make sense of some of Microsoft’s recent moves under CEO Steve Ballmer. He famously dismissed the iPhone at launch, and then proceeded to watch it change the mobile, then personal computing industries forever. Why isn’t Microsoft putting just a fraction of its substantial resources towards Office apps for iOS? After all, what is Microsoft but a software company first and foremost?
The story for the battle of tablet platform market share is not over–but all indications are that it will be a one-horse race for a while.
By shunning iOS and giving Apple the keys to the tablet-productivity-suite kingdom, Microsoft is potentially forsaking its last lifeline in the Post PC Era.
