Microsoft to Launch More Multi-Platform Products in 2012

Mike Halsey MVP
Dec 17, 2011
Microsoft
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In a week where Microsoft have released a SkyDrive app for Windows Phone, OneNote for the iPad and updates to Hotmail, the Senior Director of Office 365, Tom Rizzo, has said we should expect more platforms to be supported by Microsoft mobile products next year.

In an interview with veteran Microsoft journalist Mary-Jo Foley, Rizzo said "We want to work where people work, whether it’s online or offline, and on various platforms."  He went on to say that Android is in the frame as well as a bigger focus on the iPad.

So why would Microsoft do this when they have their own tablet operating system, Windows 8, coming out within a year?  Well let's not forget that Microsoft are a 'software' company, not an operating system company first and foremost.  While Windows might be a huge revenue earner for them on the desktop and the server, Office also does well for them on both PCs and Macs, where on both platforms it is the dominant office productivity package.

All in all we're moving towards a world of apps.  Anyone who picks up an iPad won't expect to have to go online to use a service such as Office 365.  They'll expect there to be an apps for it.  As such we can fully expect Microsoft to deliver such an app, or more likely a series of them, that will deliver the entire Office 365 experience to their customers on the iPad.

But why should Android be left out?  It's becoming more and more common for cross-scripted packages to be ported to every mobile platform and the tools have existed for some time to enable this.  Thus it is cheaper and simpler than ever before and Microsoft would only be sensible to make sure that their productivity apps are available for Android devices and others including those form Blackberry and perhaps even WebOS.

As I mentioned before this is nothing new for Microsoft who have been producing and supporting office on the Mac for many years.  Why should this software company be defined by their operating system?  If their cloud products are genuinely good and people are using them in ever greater numbers, it makes good business sense to support those customers on the platforms they choose to use.  After all, you don't make something a cloud-based service in order to tie them to a particular operating system, or even web browser.

Other companies, including Google with its own web apps system, have fallen some way behind Microsoft this year with products that simply don't stand up against Office 365.  These companies could still come forward with a winner, but the longer they take and the more platforms Microsoft support in the interim, the harder it will be for competitors to compete long-term.  After all, just ask Microsoft what sales are like for their Windows Phone OS.  If anybody knows how tough competition can be when you arrive late to the party, Microsoft do.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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