A little over a week ago, there were reports (again) that Microsoft could be launching its Microsoft Office productivity suite on iOS some time in November. The Daily who originally broke the news a couple of months ago is now back and is “confirming” the release and has even revealed a specific date – the 10th of November.
Microsoft will launch Office for iPad on Nov. 10, The Daily has learned. This follows reports earlier this month that a late fall release was likely… We’ve learned that the development team within Office Mobile finished its work on the project last month, and the efforts of the design group wrapped soon after. The app is now in the hands of a usability team that appraises software that utilizes the Metro design language for “Metro compliance” and suggests changes as needed. When approved by the team, the app likely will go to Apple for app store approval, which could take a couple of weeks.
The first time the news broke which was accompanied by an image, Microsoft flat out denied the authenticity of the app, leading us to believe that this might merely be a pipe dream. The question we have to ask is whether Microsoft releasing Office onto iOS devices would be completely out of the question. After all with Windows 8 coming up, we can imagine that Microsoft would rather focus their efforts towards releasing a tablet version of Office for Windows 8 devices rather than for the competition.
On the flip side it could be argued that given the iPad’s marketshare, Microsoft could stand to gain from releasing Office on the iPad. After all they did that with OS X, so there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t do the same for iOS as well. Either way the 10th of November is a pretty long way to go, so until then we suggest taking this with a grain of salt for now.
[Image Credit – BGR]
Filed in . Read more about iPad, Microsoft Office and Software.