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Microsoft to release Office 2008 for iPhone?
I don’t know what kind of crack Matt Veenstra from TribalMedia is smoking, but I do know that he should share it.
Microsoft can’t even get Entourage to work properly with Exchange…what chance in hell do they have of making a mobile version work?
But why did Apple wait? Here is the reason. Microsoft will be announcing and showing a demo of Office for the iPhone at the February event.
We all are expecting John Carmack of id Software to come on stage, and probably someone from Adobe touting Flash or such. But we were not counting on the big announcement from Microsoft.
One of the iPhone’s must glaring omissions is support for Office and Exchange servers. Office 2008 for the Mac has been delayed much longer than any product should be, and Microsoft has a very competent team of Macintosh engineers who right solid code. They could have gotten this done much faster, but they needed to make sure the base code for Office 2008 is running on the iPhone.
Mac zealots you can flame me for saying Microsoft has competent engineers, but they do. I have met a few people working there, and they have all been quality engineers.
If Apple released the SDK for the iPhone without a big development partner, there would only be a lot of small developers making shareware apps for it. In general these apps could cause more problems than the value they would add to the platform. These apps will add value for the end user, but not value for Apple, Inc. Office will add real value for Apple by validating the platform, and other companies will then follow Microsoft’s lead.
For those who say no way, Microsoft will never do this because they are trying to sell Windows Mobile and this will further hurt their sales of Windows Mobile as one of the biggest competitive advantages it has is Office and Exchange support. That is a wrong assumption. Microsoft will get a higher per copy royalty when selling Office for the iPhone than they will for Windows Mobile with Office when bundling with a hardware manufacture.
Microsoft is all about making money. Even when that means working with Apple, and it does not hurt that Office on the iPhone helps improve the hipness of their image as well.
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