As this blog has been covering over the last two months, Microsoft finally brought the Office business suite to the iPad at the end of March. Within six weeks the applications had been downloaded 27 million times, a major success for the company. Now, according to ZDNet, the company is bringing them the Android platform in the fall of 2014.
However, there were some questions from the industry about why the company would launch a touch enabled version of the software on the iPad and port it to Android, before deploying it onto a Windows 8 tablet.
During the recent Code/Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about why the iPad, and now Android, platforms are getting the touch apps before Windows 8. The answer is simply market share.
“The intent here is to make sure our services are available on all devices. There are going to be Windows devices and there are going to be other devices and we have to make sure our services run on all of them,” Nadella said. “That said, iPad has the most share. We are definitely going to have touch-first Office on Windows, and it is coming. But I didn’t want us to hold back.”
The Microsoft business suite is one of the most popular for businesses and consumer alike, and it seems clear that the company is focusing on a strong mobile push. With the help of an Excel consulting firm, any company can embrace the mobile platform and take the spreadsheet into the digital age.
