Office for iPad: Yes or No?

I honestly think that Office for the iPad is over rated. Yes it will be a popular app on the iPad but so much time has passed that iPad users have already found alternatives.

Preview works on the iPad for viewing. iWorks apps work for the most part for editing. There is apps like Quickoffice that are very good as well.

The subscription aspect alone will stop me from even considering it. Its too little to late IMHO

MS Office for iOS would require a new build of the software but this is a huge untapped market that Microsoft has shunned for 3 years. I hear people in my office claim that the iPad is the tool to replace computers and revolutionize our way of doing business, but they cannot come up with a way to get the sales rep in the field to create a word document. Despite wanting to free itself from the chains of laptops, notebooks, and desktop pcs, the companies that make up the Fortune 500 do not have a soup to nuts solution for a set of tools that can replace what they use to conduct business. Yes, cloud solutions and office clones exist, but corporations are fickle beasts and like keeping their software the same as they have always used. It took years for corporations to migrate from Lotus 123 to Excel because of the massive effort to convert files and macros. Even in 2006 proactive companies attemped to shift to OpenOffice but even that fell flat because users were reluctant to use a product that did not say their usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

So I say that the folks from Cupertino need to court Redmond with the same level of tenacity that Steve Jobs used to court the music industry in the creation of the iTunes store. Then the era of the iPad being the default piece of corporate issued hardware would be real and CTOs/CIOs would be jumping for joy around the decrease in IT spend.

Sad part is that Apple and Microsoft will just ignore this opportunity. Why???? Because.....

Office should be available everywhere. Surface RT will die, not because Office is everywhere, but because it is a half assed product that hasn't had anywhere near the proper amount of design effort put into it. Surface Pro will not be affected in any way, and will be the success in the tablet space for Microsoft, not Surface RT. Microsoft should stay out of hardware; they have never made much money at it (aside from keyboards, game controllers and mice). All Microsoft hardware (with the exceptions noted above, have been money pits. They haven't made any money on Zune, probably haven't made any money on Xbox/Xbox 360, and won't make any money on Surface RT. As for the Windows vs. Office argument, it can be argued that going forward, as desktop PCs become less and less prominent in everyday life, Windows 8 will similarly become less and less of a must have. As time goes on, tablet devices (and I mean iPads, and Android tablets) are going to eventually have an installed base greater than that of PCs. Neither of those platforms will have any version of Windows on them. They will, however, run Office, if it is available. Microsoft can try to use Office to leverage Windows, but all they will be doing is leaving an increasingly large customer base open to other solutions, Whether they be Google Apps, or other parties making Office compatible packages, in either case, Microsoft derives NO REVENUE. If Microsoft Office is made available to iOS/Android, all of those who own those devices become potential customers. The fact that there are 200 Million iPads out there should have made the decision pretty easy. You can make Office available to those 200 Million potential customers and take that revenue, or you can turn away from those customers. If you turn away from them, do not be surprised if they don't buy Windows 8 tablets, because guess what, they won't.

This is a very complex question and I would say yes but it would need to be a cut\slimmed down version of office to allow for the iPad's storage limitations. As other readers have noted alternatives are plentiful and that's true, it would be nice to have office programs that run natively on all tablet devices if Microsoft commits fully they could make it happen.

They HAVE to release it for iOS/android. They have no choice.
There are 2 things that keep Office on top. It's document format and excel being great a few esoteric things.

The battle is really about where a business document is created. If it starts life on something other than Office MS have lost. The more iPads and android tablets sell the more likely that documents will start off on those devices first. Eventually no one will need office compatibility because half the docs out there would have been created with another format.

All it takes is for google to do a native version of their docs suite and the clock will start ticking for offices demise. If apple ever got serious as well with iWork that's another huge problem. Finally if apple, google and whoever else start to use an a completely standardised format for documents Office will be in a lot of problems.

People said the same thing about Internet explorer, or silverlight or any windows media files etc... They all relied on the fact that windows was the platform they were built on and that ensured success. Now that mobile and the web has made windows irrelevant as a platform that can lock people in,it's time Office to find a home elsewhere.