Microsoft Announces Availability of Office 365 Personal, Office for iPad

By David Delony, Contributing Writer

Microsoft (News - Alert) has finally announced the availability of Microsoft Office 365 Personal and Microsoft Office for the iPad.

“By offering Office 365 Personal, in addition to Office 365 Home, we are better positioned to deliver the right Office to a broader range of households–whether it’s an individual or a family of five,” Jevon Fark wrote in an official company blog post.

Users can purchase Office 365 Personal on a yearly or monthly basic for $69.99 or $6.99 respectively. They can install the full suite of Office applications on ione computers or one tablet, including the iPad, as well as smartphones. They can also access the Web-based versions. The Personal 20 gigabytes of online storage. In addition, users get 60 world minutes of Skype (News - Alert).

The announcement also marks the availability of Office for the iPad, marking the arrival of tablets as serious productivity tools.

While it might seem strange that Microsoft is producing applications for a competitor, especially one that’s blamed for Microsoft’s recent faltering in PCs and tablets, there’s actually a precedent. Microsoft has been a longtime software maker for Apple (News - Alert) products. Excel actually started life as a Mac application in the ‘80s before being ported over to Windows.

Microsoft also made Office Online applications available through the Chrome Web Store, a tacit backtracking in its “Scroogled” campaign, claiming that Chromebooks were unsuitable for real work because they couldn’t run Office. One ad featured the cast of the show “Pawn Stars” appraising a Chromebook and saying that it was worthless for this very reason.

The availability of Office Personal cements Microsoft’s shift to a service provider rather than a software vendor. In this case, platforms and operating systems are less important and giving customers what they want is a priority, hence the support for systems like the iPad and Chromebook that actively compete with Windows.

(source: http://www.lyncmigration.com/topics/lyncmigration/articles/376428-microsoft-announces-availability-office-365-personal-office-ipad.htm)