The combination of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac, Office for iPad and OneNote for Mac suggests that Microsoft still thinks that Apple's platforms are still fertile ground. Office is still front and center for many in the corporate and institutional worlds. Lots of Mac users depend on Office to get their work done, and that's unlikely to change. Office remains one of the best selling software packages for the Mac.

Microsoft's note-taking app is a decade old, but it's not available in Mac native form, leaving the market wide open for competitors like Evernote to dominate. A well-integrated Mac and iPad Microsoft Office ecosystem would certainly be fierce competition for Apple, which is still in a rebuilding year after gutting the iWork apps to get them to work more seamlessly across iOS and OS X.Īnother piece of the puzzle: Microsoft may bring OneNote to the Mac in the next few weeks. Microsoft expert Mary Jo Foley suggested in February that an iPad version is coming sooner than people think, perhaps some time in the first half of 2014. The other is a version of Office that will run on iPads. Of course, a new version of Office for Mac is only one tantalizing piece of the puzzle. But Microsoft is following Adobe's Creative Cloud lead, offering an annual subscription with the promise of regular updates, along with other benefits, such as the ability to share one subscription with multiple devices, a free OneDrive cloud service account with 20 GB of storage, free Skype world minutes and more.

You can still buy Office in a single user version. Much of their focus has been to make Office a subscription-based service rather than a monolithic software suite that gets updated once every few years. Like most alternative productivity suites, iWork apps try to be good corporate citizens, offering Office file compatibility for import and export, but there's a difference between file compatibility and native file support, and many users of iWork apps and other tools have run into issues with documents just not looking right when they're translated into Office formats.Īs I said at the outset, Apple has changed, but so has Microsoft. Many businesses and institutions continue to rely on Office as their standard. Despite the advances that Apple has made, Microsoft Office still reigns supreme in corporate environments and elsewhere.

As I said back in February, 'Almost' isn't good enough. Free software alternatives to Office like LibreOffice may still raise eyebrows, but Google has normalized many people to using Google Docs for their productivity software and collaboration needs, for example.

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