[mikestew]

I wonder if they aren't a little late on this. I assume that I'm not the only one that found out I can get along just fine without Office on an iPad (or in my own personal case, get along just fine without Office at all). If the free Pages/Keynote/Numbers doesn't do it, I probably need a "real" computer anyway.

That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices anyway, despite their lack of Office. Then folks find out that they can do what they want to do despite that lack of Office. Maybe they've been using it by default, not because they really need it. Then Microsoft comes out with Office for iOS and there's a collective shrug and a "meh".

[hrktb]

I have yet to see any iOS app doing a reliable job in even just displaying Excel and Word documents.

A long time ago I thought that LibreOffice or Pages were close enough, good enough to not need Office, but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place. It might be 98% OK, but you can't always afford to give up on the 2% of information your are missing.

Forcing Office users to give a sensible version of the files when sharing is the best solution, but having a native iOS version of Office for when that's not an option is invaluable.

[codeulike]

but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place

We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.

[hrktb]

IMO the issue is more with the document format than what people are doing with it. The most recurrent problem I've seen was with text that was deleted at some point appearing instead of the current version.

What I'd really want in the first place is people to care if what they are sharing is in the right format.

When a non technical clients asks a designer to see some early drafts of a site's UI, they will usually receive rendered jpg or png files, not Photoshop or Illustrator files. Most school teachers would be pissed of if students were to turn in home assignments in tex. I find it inconsiderate to send me docx files for documents that are read only on my side, just send me the PDF instead.

[toddmorey]

I agree with you. I think people have diversified. Office isn't going away, but their prolonged absence on other platforms opened some doors that they can't close again.

I've seen much more openness to other document formats across industries. It's a bit like BYOD in enterprise, but at the document level. For example, it's been 5 years since I've been at a conference that requires slides to be PPT.

They will probably always own the high end: advanced documents for the 20% of knowledge workers that need those features; custom Enterprise workflows, etc. But fewer and fewer people will ever require access to the Office Suite in any form.

[encoderer]

I think you're a little on the leading edge of this and, most importantly, it seems you don't use office heavily in your job.

[zenbowman]

If you can get along without Office, then you are not their target customer. The marketing and sales folk at my company are so dependent on (and skilled with) Excel that it would surprise most techies to see what they can do with what we consider very primitive tools.

This is a good move, and Microsoft has always been better as the underdog, they've just been away from that role for a long time.