Microsoft may create Office for iPad

MS Office for iPad would be a good thing, especially if they strip out all the stuff most of the people the iPad is geared toward don't need.

I pray it looks nothing like Office 2007 or Office 2010.

It'd be nice to at least have the option of MS Office for the iPad, and I see this statement as a positive, but I don't see a product coming in the next year or so unless they have already been trying to port the Office applications to the iPhone, which doesn't seem likely. As long as I have access to an application that is fully compatible with the Office file formats (and, let's be honest, the current support for them in the Mac OS tends to mangle the files) then I'm happy.

The whole point of the iWork demo was to force Microsoft along for the ride. And the $9.99 price is saying you can't charge $300 for it either.

So much for Courier.

I'd buy it. Even at $199.

If MS produces a version of Office for the iPad, that will make me a lot more likely to buy one.

I'll bet DataViz beats them to it with Docs2Go. And I'll bet DataViz does a better job at a cheaper price point.

Doesn't affect me much, I'm going use Pages now anyway.

I haven't used MS Office in 3 years. I've been using Google Docs for everything, and I'm never at a loss. No worries about storage space, having to send attachments, and I've got billions of dollars of hardware out there working for me to back up my documents with redundant systems. For free. It's memory-lightweight compared to MS Overbloat, and will run well enough from an iPad, judging by the specs.

If MS does go through with this I just hope they don't gimp the software or have 10 different versions of it. Like iPad Office Home Edition, Business Edition and Ultimate Edition. Keep it simple. One version, one price. And they can't go too much more than $10 a pop for each component unless they can offer something Apple can't.

One thing's for sure: if MS does release Office on the iPad Apple may be forced to add the ability to print over wifi. But if Apple never intends to offer printing then offering iWork was a mistake and will only add to the growing list of the iPad's shortcomings.

If I had the option of Excel and Numbers on the iPad, I would choose Excel every time. On the flipside, Pages > Word.