Microsoft seems to be favoring Android users over the users on its own platform when it comes to the latest upcoming suite of apps that it will be dropping on mobile. Touch-first Microsoft Office is heading our way and surprisingly Microsoft is sliding the app over to Android, even before its own mobile OS, according to ZDNet. It seems a little weird at first but then it begins to make some sense when you think about who benefits from this set of apps the most. Being that Windows 8 is Microsofts own mobile platform you would expect them to get Touch-first Office before anyone else, but that is changing. Microsoft is under a new leader now and he is making decisions based off of necessity this time around.
With Touch-first Microsoft Office the Android OS seems to be the platform that demands it the most which is why they have chosen to launch it here first, although it will still be a few months before we see its actual release. Windows 8 users will still have to wait a little longer before they can touch the app themselves. Reportedly Touch-first Office won’t be out for the Windows 8 platform until sometime in the Spring of next year which is quite a bit longer than we would have expected. It all breaks down to where Microsoft could stand to financially benefit the most out of a staggered release of major apps, and that just happens to be Android since it has the most marketshare.
In the past Microsoft apps have been primarily bound to the Windows phone platform but Satya Nadella refuses to keep things this way going forward, stating in a tweet on May 28th that “apps power experiences across devices, and we will not be bound to one app, on one device, in one place.” This is a smart move for Nadella and Microsoft as it allows them to really capitalize on the opportunity to get their applications into the hands of more and more users. A staged rollout from the most popular mobile OS to the least makes the most sense from a business standpoint, although this may end up souring more than a few Windows users in the process.