The Future of Office for Apple Devices

The Office team's on a roll. After releasing the redesigned free Office.com web apps and finally shipping Office for iPad—as a much more full-featured suite than most of us would have expected—it looks like it's going to be a good year for the 2nd most important team in Redmond (presumably Windows is still considered more important for the company). And so, yesterday, the Office Team ran an IAmA Q&A session on Reddit yesterday as, perhaps, a bit of publicity for the new apps and a chance to answer a few questions from users.

There were a few interesting facts revealed by the Office for iPad team—which, incidentally, is the Office for Mac team as well. When asked why the apps shipped without print support, they said “Print is a high demand feature that we intend to introduce in due course,” and also indicated that since Office is a subscription service, they'll be shipping updates and new features far quicker than in the past. Promising, at least. Though, all features won't ever make their way over; macros, especially, aren't expected to be added to Office for iPad barring an App Store policy change.

Building Office for iPad was, as should be assumed, not something that just started recently. "The decision to ship Office for iPad was made before Satya became CEO. Steve Ballmer approved the plan to ship Office for iPad." It took such a long time because they wanted to get it right, delivering an Office experience that felt familiar to existing Office users but was also perfect on touch. “Since we were designing Office for iPad from a “blank slate” so to speak, we wanted to take the time to deliver the highest possible quality Office experience that is fully optimized for the iPad. A wise man once said, “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” That rings true for how we thought about it” said Kaberi, Technical Product Manager of Office for iPad.

It's impossible to say if they could have shipped Office for iPad sooner—I'd like to think they absolutely could have if they'd wanted to—but what really matters is that it's here, it's polished, and is something plenty of people will want to use. They're so serious about getting it working good, they have an entire lab of iPads to test it in every possible scenario. It's even built using native Objective C code for its UI, with the core engine behind the apps being the same C++ core that powers ever edition of Office. It's the real deal.

The question still remains if enough people will want to pay for Office 365 to use it, but there seems to be enough who do to have Word and Excel rather high on the top grossing list of the App Store. There were plenty of people asking if the Office apps will be available for direct purchase without a subscription on the iPad, but that was never answered—presumably, of course, the only option Microsoft will ever offer is the subscription.

Then, there's the future. In addition to the promise of print support coming to Office for iPad, the team confirmed that “Yes, we are working on the next version of Office for the Mac.” They also said that the work on Office for iPad will help with shipping the next version of Office for Mac. “The code for Office for iPad and Office for Mac is shared, as the development platforms for both are very similar. :) The iPad work required us to create an all-new UI and to redesign the interface between UI and the internal logic. That work actually helps us with de-Carbonizing Office for the Mac, instead of delaying or hindering it. We're able to create new Cocoa UI on the Mac and tie it into the new logic interface now.” That work will now help with shipping the next Office for Mac, and the touch interface research will presumably help as they make Office for the Windows Store and even Android tablets, both of which were promised during the IAmA (though at the same time, the idea of Office for Linux was shot down).

And yet, the most interesting part of the interview was the banner over Microsoft's Silicon Valley headquarters that the Office for iPad team shared (pictured above). "The most anticipated Office. Ever." That doesn't read like words from a team who begrudgingly released the minimum of Office compatibility for the iPad possible, just to keep competition at bay. It reads like a team that's truly proud of their work, of one who really does want the best of Office on the most popular platforms, whether or not they're Microsoft's.

“We want to bring great Office experience to our customers who want to be productive on their tablets," said Sangeeta Mudnal, Excel's Group Program Manager. That's the spirit needed if Microsoft wants to compete: making productivity tools we'll all want to use on any device. If they keep improving Office for iPad and adding more feature, there's a solid chance for that. There's still the fear that Microsoft will treat the iPad as a second-class citizen going forward, and give the best of Office to their own Windows 8.1 tablets—and yet, that banner above makes me think that's not what Microsoft's thinking.

They're proud to have Office on iPad. That's a very good thing.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.