Who cares about Office for iPad?
According to the rumour mill, Office for iPad will land this July. Unfortunately for Microsoft, not July 2010, when it might have mattered.
John Gruber explains the problem:
From what I’ve heard, Office for iPad is impressive. It’s been held up chiefly by internal politics.
Expanding on that a little, Microsoft has two major products: Windows and Office. For a long while, it wanted Office everywhere, but then for its own products unwisely forced Windows everywhere. The two collided, resulting in Microsoft holding back Office for iOS in order to use it as a differentiator for its own tablet devices.
This was a spectacularly dumb move, because it merely trained people that they didn’t need Office. Apple’s suite of office apps suffices for the most part on the iPad, and many people have also gravitated towards the free Google Docs, which works pretty well on tablets. But had Office arrived within months of the iPad’s release—or even a year—it could have been a game-changer and a cash-cow for Microsoft.
Even today, I don’t doubt that Office for iPad will sell to some extent. But I’ve a feeling it will—regardless of quality—in many cases sell to people who think they need it, but then don’t actually use it. In plenty of cases, though, I suspect people just won’t buy it at all, especially if it’s tied to a subscription service.
Still, at least Office for iPad will stop people arguing the iPad can’t be used for serious work—although they’ll no doubt smugly use the headline “Now Office for iPad is here, the iPad can finally be used for real work”, thereby leading them to be strangled with a spare iOS device charging cable.
I don’t think the iPad is a good option for serious work regardless of whether it has Office — unless your work mainly consists of doing things you can do entirely in a single application, without exchanging data between different apps, and without pulling together things created in different apps.
The fact that people like Gruber or Dalrymple regularly point to articles about iPad users who use their iPads for work merely underlines the fact that this type of usage, rather than being the norm, is a novelty that is so newsworthy that reporters feel compelled to write articles about it.
I’ve tried using iPads for work since I got my first iPad back in 2010. I’ve finally given up and bought, of all things, a Surface Pro 2.
I think it depends on the nature of “serious work”. That definition is key to the discussion. If “serious work” means Office, or certain other tasks that iOS isn’t (yet) capable of (high-end audio mixing, CAD, quite a lot of — but not all — graphic design), it’s absolutely not the right platform. But for writing music, writing words, working on photography, and in various other fields (medicine, education, etc.), it’s a very powerful platform that can stand alone.
What will be interesting is watching all this evolve over the coming years. Given that the iPad’s only exited since 2010, it’s amazing to see the mature apps and interfaces that now exist in the very best of the more complex apps (such as Korg Gadget); whether Office matters in this context is another matter entirely.
Yes, there are fields where the iPad is a good option. But even simple things normal people do all the time can be very problematic on the iPad.
Say you’re applying for a job (I’m guessing one of the most creative things most people use their computers for). You’ll have to write a cover letter that fits the job description. It would be nice if you could see the website with the job ad and your word processor at the same time. You’ll have to touch up your portrait photo. Even just getting the picture from a random photo editor into Pages can be cumbersome on an iPad. You’ll have to update your job experience, which probably involves looking at different sources, and compiling all of that stuff into a single document. And so on. Eventually, you’ll have to export your cover letter and CV as PDFs, attach both to an email (maybe ZIP them into a single file), and send them off.
Most people can get this done on a Mac or PC. I’m not sure most people will figure out how to do this on an iPad, and if they do, it won’t be simple.
The iPad makes some things really simple, but this doesn’t come free. The same design decisions that make some things simple also make a lot of other things much harder. These other things often involve doing work.
To be clear, this is not an inherent limitation of touchscreen devices, or of tablets. It’s something Apple seems to have consciously decided to do, because it does have advantages. Not having any kind of mode where you can see more than one app at a time makes the iPad much simpler. Not having any good way for different apps to access the same data makes the iPad much simpler. Not having any kind of concept for documents or files on the system level makes the iPad much simpler.
But these things also make the iPad much less powerful, and as a result, tasks that actually require more power become harder, or even impossible.
Well, if Office for Mac is anything to go by, MS don’t give a grumbling fuck about the QC of their products on Apple’s OSs, though maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by this revelation. There are major productivity-crippling bugs in Office 2011 that have been present for the product’s entire lifecycle, rendering it unfit for professional use, and face-palmingly annoying to use for anyone else – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to, say, copy-paste text from Word using a keyboard shortcut without having to go back and forth, repeatedly CMD-V-ing until it finally sticks. I will not be touching Office on iOS for this reason.