Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, has no plans to make a version of its Office suite of programs to run on Apple Inc.’s iPad, said Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division.
Elop said the company would take a “wait and see” approach to tailoring software for the iPad, which goes on sale on April 3. He also said Google Inc. hasn’t made any headway against Microsoft in the business software market.
“We haven’t heard anything about Google making inroads against Office, because they’re not,” Elop said today in an interview. Office includes word-processing, spreadsheet and other business-productivity programs.
Microsoft will begin selling the next version of the product, dubbed Office 2010, on May 12. The debut comes as Google and other Web companies are pushing alternatives that cost less or are even free. Office brings in about 90 percent of the revenue of Elop’s division, which is the company’s largest and one of its most profitable.
The version of Office 2010 that goes on sale on May 12 is designed for businesses. A version for consumers will be available by late June. By then, the company also will introduce stripped-down versions of Word and the spreadsheet program Excel that are accessible free over the Web.
Demand looks promising, particularly from companies, and 6 million people have downloaded a prerelease “beta” version of the product, Elop said. That’s twice as many as downloaded the beta version of Office 2007, the last upgrade.
Of those beta users polled by Microsoft, 80 percent said they would recommend Office 2010 to friends, and 90 percent said the software made them more productive, he said.
Cloud Computing
Elop said corporate buyers are less interested in discussing Google and other competitors and more concerned about whether to move to new “cloud”-based versions of Microsoft software. Customers who choose this route don’t run the software on their own computers, instead paying a monthly fee to Microsoft to deliver it over the Internet from the company’s massive data centers.
“We never say never, but we have no current plans” to develop a version of Office for the Apple iPad, Elop said. Last year Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it would create a version to work on Nokia Oyj’s smartphones, since millions of Office users already own those devices.
An iPad edition of Office would likely be built by a unit within Microsoft’s consumer business that creates versions of Office that work with Apple’s Macintosh personal computers. Kristen Woody, a spokesman for that unit, says it “doesn’t have anything to share at this time.”
