Office for iPad: saviour or cannibal?

Office for iPad will drive usage of Microsoft's productivity suite on the Apple tablet, but resellers have told CRN they don't expect it to kill off sales of the Surface or OEM devices.

In January, Microsoft reported it had sold more than double the number of Surfaces compared with the prior quarter. It comes after that grim $900 million write-off due to unsold Surfaces in mid-2013.

Microsoft has continued to face competition from third-party apps and BYOD, as well as ongoing pressure from Google Docs.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, used a presentation on 27 March in San Francisco to make the long-expected announcement that the vendor's profitable Office software will launch on the iPad.

In the Microsoft blog, Nadella wrote: "We’re bringing Office, the gold standard in getting things done, to the iPad.

"A billion people rely on Office every day, and we’ve worked diligently to create a version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint that delivers the best productivity experience available on the iPad.

"It’s built from the ground up for touch, is unmistakably Office in its design, and is optimised for iPad. Office for iPad offers unmatched rendering of content and delivers unparalleled authoring, analysis and presentation experiences that Office customers expect on all of their devices."

The strategy behind Office for iPad harks back to Microsoft's dominant period as a pure-play software vendor in the 1980s and 1990s.

One close Microsoft partner, Brennan IT head of marketing Robin Marchant, told CRN that the move was a return, of sorts, to Microsoft's core business of software licensing.

Brennan IT is one of a narrow channel of just 13 commercial resellers for the Surface. Marchant said that Office for iPad wouldn’t be a Surface-killer by any means.

"Our clients directly replace their workstations with Microsoft Surface," he told CRN. "The Surface has the power to run all their enterprise software... and is more ingrained in a work environment with its hybrid nature of laptop and tablet."

Marchant said the Microsoft tablets were selling well. "Surface is one of our most popular item. There's a great deal of interest whenever we send out newsletters or promotions.

"So there will be a degree of excitement about Office for iPad, but it won't necessarily be the be-all and the end-all," he added.

Nor did close Apple partner Leetgeek think that Office for iPad would hurt the Surface or Microsoft OEMs – but for an entirely different reason.

Ben Corbett, the Adelaide's company business development director, said Office for iPad would arouse tremendous interest, but was sceptical about the functionality.

"They're not going to make it so good that people move off [Microsoft's] own environments," Corbett told CRN. 

"Office for iPad will get a lot of attention, but we will need to apply careful due diligence to see what we're actually getting," said Corbett. "When Outlook 2011 came out, Mac clients were expecting the same product as the PC but it didn't turn out that way."

Sydney-based Microsoft partner HubOne does not have a licence to resell the Surface – in lieu it has a referral agreement with Harvey Norman to provide its clients with the tablets.

Founder and CTO Nick Beaugeard said: "Office is already available on iPhone, Mac... a bunch of different devices. But the best experience of it is still on [a Microsoft OS]. When I made the leap myself from the iPad to Surface it felt great not to be compromising anymore. The iPad is good as a content consumption device, but not for content creation.

"Our clients are SMB accounting firms and the Surface is a boon to them," Beaugeard added.

Consumption device

Their comments gel with a 2013 study by Gartner, which agreed that the iPad was best left to consumption, not creation.

Analyst Mark Cortner wrote: "As a general rule, the iPad tends to be used for text consumption, not text creation. In most use cases, only reading or light editing is done on the iPad.

"Consequently, counter to most initial assumptions, Microsoft Office on the iPad is not required, and a PDF annotation solution can be sufficient."

When asked if Office for iPad will affect online sales of the Surface, Felix Iskandar from online retailer Mwave told CRN: "Not really, because the Surface still has good features for business other than Office."

Recent sales of the Surface has exceeded expectations, according to Iskandar. "We can't get enough stock. It's not just us – a lot of retailers have the same problem."

However, Frank Triantafyllou, managing director of Melbourne-based Complete PC Solutions, was convinced that Microsoft would hurt Surface sales.

"Once the iPad gets [Office], the only disadvantage [of the iPad] is iTunes and that you can't put a USB stick in there," Triantafyllou told CRN.

"The new [Microsoft] CEO has come onboard and is trying to take advantage of the iPad by selling Office on it but it will hurt the Surface."