This might slightly heretical but do you think if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn’t exist, someone would have to make him up? I’m not going to go through the litany of (mis)judgements that helped him earn the title of America’s Worst CEO from Adam Hartung in Forbes magazine last May but there can’t be many people who disagree with some of what Hartung had to say.
He accused Ballmer of having "singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets)" and betting the company on Windows 8, "an insane bet for any CEO".
Anyway, whatever his merits as a CEO of a massive technology company, there’s no doubting Ballmer’s entertainment value even if, sometimes, that entertainment is provided unwittingly rather than deliberately.
Last week, Ballmer was interviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek on the day Office 2013 was released . During the course of the interview, he was asked whether Microsoft was concerned about competition in the cloud from Dropbox. Describing the company as "a fine little start-up", Ballmer replied Microsoft was not concerned by the fact DropBox had 100 million users, commenting "100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually".
In the course of the same interview, the interviewer stated that with 1 billion Office users today "it seems like that number can’t get that much bigger". Not so, replied Ballmer, who said that as more and more people enter the "class of information workers and knowledge workers" and more and more students get an education and take on jobs where they work with information every day, "the miracle of economic development" will help to grow the number of Office users.
Maybe so, but it may well be connected to what devices those information and knowledge workers are using in the future. If that is the case, you might expect Ballmer and Microsoft to be doing their best to ensure Office is available to as many platforms as possible and, in today’s world, that means tablets. We all know Microsoft and Windows have come late to the tablet party but it doesn’t really seem like a good excuse for Ballmer to cut off a potentially huge source of income for the company’s Office business by dragging his heels over a potential version of Office for the iPad (or other tablets).
Nevertheless, when he was asked specifically what was happening, if anything, to Office for the iPad, Ballmer responded that he had "nothing to say on that topic" instead promoting the ability to access Office through the browser as "very important". Despite the reaction of some commentators, Ballmer didn’t completely dismiss the idea of Office for the iPad. "We’ll see what we see in the future," he added.
By most measures, a version of Office for iOS would make a lot of sense in terms of expanding the suite’s reach, especially in what has become one of the fastest growing areas of technology. It may well be that Microsoft’s ambitions to use Windows to achieve the same dominance in the tablet arena that it has in the PC world is deterring it from releasing something on the Apple platform that could act as a significant differentiator for people choosing an iPad or a Windows tablet, especially in the business world.
If so, this is a short-sighted decision because there is absolutely no guarantee that Office will be able to extend its hegemony onto the tablet, especially if Microsoft is deliberately excluding the product from a large part of the existing market. Let’s not forget that it was another Apple platform, the Mac, which played a huge part in the early evolution of the Office applications in the first place.
There’s also a very real danger that if Microsoft doesn’t release a product for the iPad (and other tablets that use OSs that aren’t Windows-based), Office may end up becoming irrelevant to a very large user base that has learned to live without it going forward.
We have a poll on this page asking people whether Microsoft should develop Office for iOS. At the moment, more than 70% of respondents are saying "yes". That’s coming at a time when Office is still important to a very large group of people who use work laptops and PCs as their primary devices. But what happens when those people use their tablets and smartphones as their main devices and Office isn’t a native application for them anymore?
And if Ballmer truly believes web browser access to Office is good enough for iPad and other tablet users, surely the same must apply to any users of Windows tablets as well. In which case, why bother developing any version of Office to work on tablets at all?
Ltd
