Microsoft brings Office to the iPad

With long-anticipated announcement, Microsoft makes bet that it can appeal to users of competing tablet from Apple.

Microsoft made it official on Thursday: Office is coming to the iPad.

The long-expected announcement is a calcuated risk that Microsoft's support of a major rival's competing tablet will work to its advantage. The hope is that enough iPad users will forego free alternatives such as Google Docs and Apple's iWorks software, and so compensate for potentially lost sales of its own Windows-based Surface tablets.

It's a beautiful set of applications," said Nadella.

For some, it represented a moment where the new Microsoft bid goodbye to the old Microsoft. When Steve Ballmer was in charge, Microsoft hewed closely to a Windows-centric view of the world where the fate of its operating system dominated the company's decision-making process.

By making Office available on the iPad, CEO Satya Nadella is making a bet that Microsoft can wean back some of the users who make up Microsoft's natural constituency - business professionals -- who now run competing productivity applications on Apple's popular tablet. The question now is how many of those same former PC users, who have become used to iPads, it can win back.

A big selling job awaits. In a revealing Twitter interchange with other Silicon Valley venture capitalists recently, Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois wrote "Google Documents and Quip are superior for documents, Keynote is superior and Excel is over-rated."

"The real goal for us is to set up to provide the apps and services that empower every user across all of these devices and experiences," said Nadella, who replaced Ballmer on Feb. 4. "That's perhaps the job number one that we do: To empower people to be productive."

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