Mark Lyn­der­say

The in­tro­duc­tion of Of­fice for iPad last Thurs­day marked a cru­cial step for­ward for Mi­crosoft in its ef­forts to ex­pand its user base in­to wide­ly used tablet and smart­phone plat­forms.To be clear, the Red­mond soft­ware com­pa­ny isn't re­al­ly sell­ing Of­fice on these new de­vices, it's sell­ing Of­fice 365, a cloud based sub­scrip­tion ser­vice (US$100 per year) that's now avail­able on Win­dows, Mac­in­tosh, An­droid and now ful­ly on iOS.If the com­pa­ny de­cides to make a ver­sion avail­able for Lin­ux, per­haps the wide­ly used Ubun­tu build, it will stand a good chance of reestab­lish­ing Of­fice as the pre­ferred plat­form for work­place pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in an in­creas­ing­ly di­verse world of soft­ware and de­vices.

But get­ting here hasn't been easy. The com­pa­ny daw­dled along for long years while smart­phone and tablet use soared and be­came en­trenched as medi­ums for not just me­dia con­sump­tion, but in­creas­ing­ly for wide­ly vary­ing lev­els of pro­duc­tive work.While it's been get­ting its own ap­proach in or­der, oth­er soft­ware com­pa­nies have worked to fill the breach, of­fer­ing Web-based so­lu­tions that are in­creas­ing­ly vi­able in a world in which broad­band is grow­ing more per­va­sive, or prod­ucts that are net­worked at their core, like the pop­u­lar Ever­note, which trades word pro­cess­ing pow­er for seam­less syn­chro­ni­sa­tion and a re­searcher's palette of tools.In­creas­ing­ly, the gold­en bul­let for mod­ern soft­ware is ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty. Peo­ple want to ac­cess the same ma­te­r­i­al no mat­ter where they are and which de­vice they hap­pen to be us­ing. Such users will take ad­van­tage of the eas­i­est, cheap­est tools that get them there.

Will that suite of tools in­clude Of­fice 365 and its var­i­ous de­vice in­car­na­tions?Satya Nadel­la, the com­pa­ny's new CEO, is bank­ing on it and do­ing so with en­thu­si­asm."Mi­crosoft is fo­cused on de­liv­er­ing the cloud for every­one, on every de­vice," he told the press at the launch of Of­fice for iPad last week."It's a unique ap­proach that cen­tres on peo­ple–en­abling the de­vices you love, work with the ser­vices you love, and in a way that works for IT and de­vel­op­ers."I'd seen Nadel­la in ac­tion sev­en years ago at a Mi­crosoft Con­ver­gence meet­ing in San Diego back when we both had more hair and most of it was black.It's al­most im­pos­si­ble to form any kind of de­fin­i­tive opin­ion of some­one af­ter just a few mo­ments on­stage, but Nadel­la's pitch of the com­pa­ny's new cus­tomer re­la­tions man­age­ment tool was even, sen­si­ble and clear, even to a non-de­vel­op­er.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers

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