Microsoft are looking at the possibility of bringing their Office applications to the iPhone. According to Fortune, their engineers are already giving the SDK a once-over, and their execs are figuring out where opportunities may lie for getting MS software onto the iPhone.
Microsoft’s Tom Gibbons, who is in charge of the Specialized Devices and Applications Group—which includes the Mac Business Unit—told Fortune that they’re investigating iPhone development.
“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” [said Gibbons]. “To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now.”
Although you can already view MS Office documents on the iPhone, most users want or need the ability to edit docs on the fly as well.
Getting Office Mobile apps onto the iPhone as soon as possible seems a complete no-brainer to me. Especially since there are sure to be a number of rival applications that will offer compatibility with MS Office – Documents To Go is one that I would expect to see making an effort in this area. It will be interesting to see how quickly Microsoft moves if they do decide to bring some of their programs to the iPhone …
Via: CNNMoney.com
Tags: Microsoft, Office Mobile, Office apps on iPhone, SDK, Documents To Go
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d rather Softmaker come to the iPhone than Microsoft, unless they really put up their game and do a better offering than on Windows Mobile.
Even the Palm OS has a much better Word offering through Dataviz.
I feel pretty lukewarm about whether I’d use an MS Office for iPhone suite. I never liked Word Mobile much on Windows Mobile – much preferred Phatnotes, and don’t really use spreadsheet and presentation apps all that much …
Yeah, I do think a cool thing to have would be a word processor of some sort. I think that would be fantastic on the iPhone, at least for light editing/writing.
I don’t much care for the other programs htough, you’re right.
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