Thursday, Microsoft Corporation released its Office application (comprising of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) free for Android tablets. This is an efficient and worthy step by Microsoft to attract as many mobile customers using its software.
In addition to this release, it also made its popular Outlook email program available to run on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad. This will attract millions of users familiar with Outlook from their work desktops.
These steps to gain as many possible customers to use its software are pre-steps by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella in the attempt to race with Apple and Google in terms of cellphone users, where Microsoft has fallen behind former and latter.
Last March, Microsoft released a touch-friendly version of Office for Apple’s iPad, before it did so for their own Windows devices.
With the advent of industry-standard Office app for Google’s Android and Apple Inc.’s iOS, Microsoft is trying to form a base of users which it can later persuade to sign up for Office 365, the full, internet-based version of Office starting at $7 per month for personal users.
We have been looking at the test versions of Microsoft’s Office app for android for the past three months, but this Thursday is the first date when the application is available as fully finished version available on the Google Play app store.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the key elements of Microsoft’s top-selling Office suite of applications, which gave hit on Apple’s mobile devices with 80 million downloads since last March, as per Microsoft.
Microsoft plans to release a new, touch-friendly version of its Office apps for Windows devices later this year when it plans to release its Windows 10 O.S.
The new Outlook app, based on Acompli (a popular app which Microsoft bought in December) will allow iPhone and iPad users much easier ways of linking with calendars and working with file attachments. The same will be issued later for Android Operating System.
