Why You'll Need It, How You'll Use It

“I can say that based on the products Microsoft currently has in the market, launching additional Office apps for Apple devices would be a logical extension of their existing strategy,” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Wired in an e-mail. Microsoft already has Mac and iOS products like Office for Mac, a note-taking app called OneNote, SkyDrive for cloud storage, and Lync, points out Rotman Epps.

What The Daily reported Tuesday is true

If what The Daily reported Tuesday is true, it’s possible that Microsoft Office for iPad could land concurrent to — or even onstage with — Apple’s first public iPad 3 demo, which is expected to be held the first week of March. It would truly make for an interesting presentation, as Apple doesn’t actively evangelize its Microsoft synergy. Microsoft will be demoing its Windows 8 OS consumer preview on Feb. 29 so the timing of an early March Office for iPad unveiling would seem to work: Microsoft’s big platform-wide announcement wouldn’t be upstaged by its smaller Apple announcement.

“You’ll use it for content curation. And it's very unlikely you'll be using the iPad in native tablet touch mode,” Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of Nivio, told Wired. Nivio is a cloud platform that lets you access your desktop and its files — including Windows and Microsoft Office — with a touch-controlled mouse pointer as input. “In most cases, you'll have it docked into a screen or a keyboard,” Dev Duggal said of the rumored Office app.

Dev Duggal thinks students and small businesses will be interested in Office for iPad. And there’s as well another prime user group: people who don’t want to spend money on multiple devices. “If they can cross-utilize devices to as well do productivity, thats a huge cost savings,” Dev Duggal said.

Elaine Coleman of Resolve Market Innovation concurs with Dev Duggal. “Tablets are a critical dual-purpose device,” Coleman told Wired, adding that close to 70 percent of personal tablet users as well use their devices for business.

Indeed, the iPad has a growing role in the world of enterprise computing, with a large percent of Fortune 500 companies adopting the tablet. So, no doubt, the addition of Microsoft Office to the enterprise mix would be welcome.

“Every day that Microsoft does not have Office apps for iPad, they lose potential sales to competitors,” Rotman Epps said. Such competitors include: Apple’s own iWork office suite; Quickoffice, an iPhone alternative for viewing, sharing and editing Microsoft Office documents; and SlideShark, an iPad-based PowerPoint platform.

Rotman Epps pointed out that these and a host of other productivity apps are all top performers in Apple's App Store. In actual fact, Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers make up three of the top five spots in the Top Charts for paid Productivity apps in the App Store. And with OS X Mountain Lion’s heavy iCloud integration, using Apple’s iWork suite will make moreover sense for users who own multiple Apple products.