In this piece, we’ll find out if these norms cover the iPad 7 and whether this 329-dollar machine will have free access to the Microsoft Office suite of apps.

This raise in display dimensions will have some implications on the software the new iPad can run.Īpparently, Microsoft has some norms in place concerning a tablet’s display size that may restrict free access to its Office apps. With iOS apps like Evernote, Mailbox, and Keynote occupying niches that used to belong to Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, the question is whether these moves come too late to shift woeful trends in mobile.With this change and the inclusion of the Smart Connector, the 7th-gen iPad became compatible with Apple’s Smart Keyboard that brings typing functionality to the tablet without the added task of charging and pairing the keyboard accessory. In the end, it might not matter why Microsoft is late to the iOS party. Officially speaking, Microsoft claims it held back Office for iPad not for strategic reasons but to make it work better, to integrate better with Microsoft's developer interfaces and web services. In the world of mobile devices - a category that already overshadows PCs - Microsoft's selling virtually no operating systems even as Office has been withheld from the only app markets that matter, those run by Apple and Google. By trying to use its apps to protect its operating system, it destroyed the relevance of both. Now Microsoft finds itself backed into a corner.

Indeed, graphical versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel debuted on the Mac years before they were available on Windows.ĭominating the desktop seemed to make Microsoft more conservative, and the company was slow to convert its software to the web, despite the rise of web-based productivity software like Google Apps, and was also slow to embrace mobile devices, holding back Office for its own laggard tablet system, which launched in 2012, years after the iPad won the market. Back before it came to dominate the personal computer industry in the mid 1990s, Microsoft was an early and zealous adopter of systems that competed with its own operating systems, including Apple's Macintosh. Microsoft's new strategy echoes Google's strategy of using its operating systems, Android and Chrome OS, as loss leaders for sales of advertising and online apps.īut this is also a return to Microsoft's roots.

Openoffice for ipad