Microsoft steps out of the box, but might wander into the sunset.
By bowing to popular demand and releasing the Office suite for the iPad, Microsoft has finally, reluctantly stepped out of its superannuated box. It is no longer primarily an operating system company. It is now primarily a software company, with a stated commitment to platform-agnostic applications. It’s a smart move, given that people no longer queue up overnight to get the latest releases of Windows for their PCs. Instead, they go post-PC, buy iPads and complain that Word doesn’t work on them.
The release of Office for iPad is being read as new CEO Satya Nadella setting a fresh direction, but it had been in the works during the tenure of his predecessor Steve Ballmer. It was too long in the making, and it may be too late. MSOffice had stolen a march in the PC age because of aggressive marketing rather than technical superiority. Microsoft had flooded the world with Windows by persuading hardware vendors to ship PCs with its OS pre-loaded. Naturally, the productivity suite designed for Windows would come out tops. But there was excellent non-proprietary productivity software out there, too, and now it’s ported to tablets.
In the post-PC age, the PC-Windows-MSOffice ecosystem is baseless. It has been so for years now, and it was time for Microsoft to wake up. The company has always been a little slow, but it has been lucky, too. It had started experimenting with a graphical interface well after Xerox pioneered the concept, but Windows became the most popular graphical OS. The company woke up to the internet long after it exploded, ages after other OSes began to mass produce servers, and yet it became such a big influencer that its browser invited legal action. Will it be as lucky this time, as it steps into the applications arena, late as usual?
