Good one :) - In that light, do you think the Office for the Mac division has a strategy for Office for iOS (but is just not allowed or funded to develop that product)?
I think iOS is a really tough problem for them - porting Mac Office to iOS would be a huge undertaking and, when finished, would be going up against Apple's iWork apps.
Apple's apps have massive advantages from being produced and sold by the hardware/software/store vendor (can't say I have a lot of sympathy for Microsoft's plight on this particular point!), a narrower feature focus (which is in many ways more desirable on touch platforms), and the mostly-impeccable Apple taste that Microsoft isn't known for.
In my opinion, though, the most difficult hurdle to overcome is that Apple sells the iWork apps for $9.99 a la carte. I can't imagine Microsoft selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint a la carte for even twice that price; they'd be reaping far lower margins than they're used to getting for Office. And I don't think they can do a heavily stripped-down version, either: it'd still take a ton of work and would be even more directly going up against iWork. What's the point?
But if I were the head of the Mac Business Unit, I wouldn't want to tell Ballmer that we have no plans whatsoever and are just going to cede what's been one of our very most profitable markets on what appears to be one of the most important platforms going forward.
And, of course, they're about to run into a somewhat similar issue with the Mac App Store: Mac iWork apps appear to be going a la carte with on-demand instant gratification on what I expect will be the primary channel for users to get Mac apps within a couple of years. Will be interesting to see Microsoft's response on that one, too... Mac Office has been a big cash cow for them.
That's the thing, though...on a mobile device (even as big as the iPad), who can use all the bells and whistles? This isn't supposed to be a huge effort.
Take PowerPoint, for example. It would be a step forward to be able to view any presentation file, but only edit certain things (like adding or editing titles and bullets). And have something like a template importer so that new presentations aren't completely plain. This would be worth downloading for a few bucks, and it wouldn't have 99% of the features of the original. Microsoft has to look beyond the, er, list of bullet points enumerating features, and focus on what's actually needed.
What could they do, though? Make PowerPoint Viewer (with a few editing features) and sell it for, what, $2.99? That seems like a tough sell against $9.99 Keynote, though it could have some limited success. Still really not where I want to be on this platform if I'm used to dominating the office suite market with huge profits.
