MacBU (Sanfrancisco area, cornered team at microsoft) just released Office on the iPad to the world. Congratulations guys.

These are truly native apps so you have to install them. Not entirely sure these days why Microsoft bothers with their Office web apps if native is so much better. Or the opposite, why bother with writing and debugging native apps on so many different platforms when web apps solves it all with one codebase only.

Some innovation. Ribbon redesigned again to accomodate larger touch areas. No brainer, but still I commend the change, except for all little used features which are either hidden or not available at all. In other words, you pay a subscription for new/edit, but in reality you get little about that. Unclear why someone would want to new/edit documents on a 10 inch tablet instead of those confortable desktop screens. Yet I can see why people in an urgent need may want that option available.

But still, what about the web version? Works on all platforms out there, including Android. Tablets are more powerful that your two-year old desktop computer, that should make room for web run apps working seamlessly (except with a laggy internet connection, but that is a different story).

So while I commend those native apps that Microsoft is shipping, I don't see their point long term. I see their point trying to close the loop with corporate people, but why corporate would not take this logic a step further and simply standardize on web apps once for all ? After all, if you are gonna store your documents online, that is just about being coherent. (not to say that these days, private cloud is the ideal).

Really, the only reason why Office users would not standardize on web apps is just because Microsoft intentionally limits their capabilities. This cannot last long until corporate people realize this secret.