It’s the thing about tech blogging which most gets under my skin, the confirmation bias. I love a little snark and editorial with my news, but the reality distortion field surrounding certain topics can be suffocating.
The Office for iPad roll out had a taste of that in the tech community. There was the expected gnashing of teeth over how long it took to port the suite over to the iPad, criticisms I also shared reflecting an older Microsoft which grossly underestimated their competition. However, it was some of the social media backlash I found most interesting. The idea that we just didn’t need Office anymore, that there were Office solutions available on the iPad which were “good enough”, and that Microsoft was so late, they weren’t relevant anymore.
Yesterday Microsoft announced via a tweet that Office for iPad had been downloaded 12 million times. It’s easy to get big numbers when you put out something for free, but that’s 12 million devices which now will potentially start converting more Apple users into Microsoft customers.
If anything it’s a small sign that Microsoft is starting to figure out that being a services company means having to make your services available to popular platforms. It’s another babystep out of the pit of irrelevance they were crawling into, and hopefully it means this tech game will get a bit more interesting this year…