Latest reports claim that Microsoft will be releasing Office for iPad, codenamed Miramar, in the first half of this year.
ZDNet’s, Mary Jo Foley says that Microsoft’s Office for iPad might beat Windows 8 version to market.
Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Marketing Tami Reller, at Goldman Sachs’ Technology conference said the company was taking a “thoughtful” approach to cross-platform models, which directly contradicted of the statement by then-CEO, Steve Ballmer, in September last year.
This was followed by Foley’s post sharing information from her trusted sources that Office for the iPad could be arriving sooner than expected.
Foley says that Microsoft officials have acknowledged the arrival of Office for iPad to the market ahead of Microsoft’s touch-first version of Office for Windows, codenamed Gemini, in “a somewhat roundabout way.”
Foley wrote “I hear Ballmer and the senior leaders of the company may have had a change of heart towards the end of last year. According to one of my contacts, Ballmer OK’d the suggestion by the Office team that they’d bring Office for iPad to market as soon as it was ready, even though that would likely mean before the Windows 8 version. I’m hearing that new date for Office for iPad is some time in the first half of calendar 2014.”
Foley notes that there is no proper word on exactly how Office for iPad will be available, but it would presumably require Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription service (either corporate or Home Premium) and will arrive with the company’s OneDrive cloud storage integration.
Microsoft officials, however, have refused to comment on anything related to Office on iPad.
