Location of Microsoft in iPad
Last week Apple released a new iPad with a Retina display, and the biggest surprise for us was that Microsoft was not making any major appearance on it. Although Microsoft offers its Office suite for the tablet, many other companies do as well. Since Microsoft does not develop iOS apps at all anymore , it has no ability to push their platform to potential buyers.
This has been their strategy from the beginning, when Apple announced in 2010 that Microsoft Office would come pre-installed on iPads. At that time it sounded like a great deal for both companies and a lot of people started buying the tablet at once, but nothing much happened since then. It’s true that tablets have not been selling so well (in comparison with smartphones), but let’s take a closer look at the situation.
About Apple
Apple sells only 200,000 iPads per day , versus 1.2 million Android tablets that go out to customers every 24 hours . Almost 90% of all tablet computers shipped are running Android OS, while Apple’s iPad has dropped to second place (according to IDC’s numbers).
Microsoft does not do anything to improve the situation and it seems that they don’t care much. iOS is much more profitable for Microsoft than Android, because Android users tend to use Google services much more often (e.g. Gmail, Drive or YouTube) and those companies pay for every single search generated on their networks . With iOS, Microsoft can only hope that users will decide to switch from Apple’s Safari browser to Internet Explorer. Since it is impossible to make money from iOS apps (without jailbreaking the device), the strategy of focusing on Android alone makes sense for Microsoft . The company has been trying to push their services aggressively in Europe , but they have not been having much success.
What’s really interesting is that Microsoft has been doing so little to promote their brand in the iOS world, whereas Apple has pushed their services everywhere. For example, they have created an official YouTube app for iOS , which seems very similar to Google’s version . But what about the Office suite? Is it not competing with Google Docs? Sure it is, but think about this for a moment. What does Google Docs offer that Microsoft’s Word, PowerPoint and Excel do not? Nothing, which is precisely why they decided to make their app look and feel almost exactly like the real thing . To be fair, Apple even copied iWorks from Microsoft in its early days , but that was back in the days of Steve Jobs, and Microsoft is hardly better than Apple is today.
It’s interesting that the only major differentiating factor between Google and Microsoft is not included in iOS . Both companies offer cloud storage for files (Google Drive vs SkyDrive), but Google Plus is not available on any iOS device , which has been a disadvantage for
For some time, we’ve been using iPad for presentations and in the classroom. However, we wondered: how is Microsoft in iPads? At first I thought that they can not be bothered to update their software and develop a new version of Office with touch screen support, but after several minutes research realized that was wrong.
There are many versions of Office for iOS (iPad) . The first was released on October 22, 2010 and had 3 applications: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The latest incarnation is Office Mobile 2011 for Office 365 subscribers. It was updated June 12th 2012 to support the iPhone 5.
Conclusion
If you want to find the location of Microsoft in iPads, then I would recommend that you search Betteridge’s law of headlines. If you’re still curious about this topic, then I will say that Microsoft is everywhere where they can make some money from iOS users. They do it through their Office 365 service and a few other minor things, but they have been doing it for a long time, which makes me think that the thing is done on purpose.
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sources feb. microsoftstreetjournal