Why Microsoft’s anti-iPad strategy will backfire

When Steve Jobs came back to run Apple in summer 1997, he famously told Apple’s Mac fans “we need to get away from this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” He then announced a $150 million investment in the then-struggling Apple by Microsoft — with Bill Gates joining the Macworld Expo announcement via satellite — and a commitment by Microsoft to keep Office for Mac on the market and at parity with the Windows version. That investment went a long way toward calming investor fears and set the stage for Jobs and team to reinvent and reinvigorate the Mac, then create the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad over the next decade.

Fifteen years later, it appears that Microsoft has concluded that for Windows to survive, the iPad has to lose.

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For more than a decade, Microsoft has failed in its tablet ambitions, with the various Pen and Tablet editions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 falling flat, and the heavy tablets that used them saw, at best, minuscule sales to a handful of hospitals and government agencies that had no other options. No one knows the number actually sold, but it has to be less than 2 million over those dozen years. By contrast, Apple has sold about 70 million iPads in just over two years of that tablet’s existence.

Office and SharePoint on the iPad nowhere in sight Microsoft is of course hoping to change that record with the release of Windows 8 for Intel-based tablets and Windows RT for ARM-based tablets this fall. But perhaps to hedge its bets, Microsoft is also trying to isolate the iPad by discouraging access to a key Microsoft technology — its Office suite — through iPad-targeted hikes in desktop virtualization fees.

Apple released an iPad version of its iWork office productivity suite for the iPad shortly after the iPad’s release, and a small company called Quickoffice followed suit, creating what has become the standard-bearer for a cross-mobile office suite. Microsoft Office for iPad is nowhere to be found. (There’s also no Android version, but with the iPad accounting for more than 90 percent of actual tablet sales, Android doesn’t matter.) Microsoft also has no SharePoint client for the iPad, and its Office 365 cloud service’s versions of SharePoint and Office do not work on the iPad in any meaningful degree.

Microsoft’s strategy is clear: Do not encourage iPad purchases by making Office or SharePoint available for that rival tablet. In the PC space, where Apple’s Mac line continues to grow in market share while Windows PCs have been on decline, Microsoft has continued to make its so-so Office available, but not a SharePoint client or Office 365 integration — Gates’ 1997 commitment to Office on the Mac clearly stopped there.

Given Microsoft’s circling of the wagons around Office and SharePoint, enterprising companies such as CloudOn developed cloud-based Windows and Office environments that iPad users could access to get the full Office suite. Entrepreneurs such as Daniel Gomez and Harmon.ie have also developed SharePoint clients for the iPad: SharePlus and SharePoint Mobile Client, respectively. But let’s face it: If Microsoft had quality versions of Office and SharePoint for the iPad, it would own the tablet productivity market in a flash.

Microsoft’s risky bet on Windows 8 Microsoft has decided it doesn’t want to be an office productivity company first and foremost. Instead, it wants to keep the Windows hegemony it has long enjoyed by throwing up roadblocks to slow iPad adoption. That’s understandable, but not realistic. At best, Windows will be a major OS on PCs and mobile devices, competing with a merged OS X and iOS, and perhaps with Android. Still, owning 30 to 50 percent of the overall computing OS market is no small thing, if only Microsoft could see that.

Having the dominant office suite and collaboration platform would give Microsoft both strong revenues and a strong role in shaping the evolution of computing beyond its own OS platform. Instead, Microsoft risks retreating into itself, with Office and SharePoint as Windows-only products in a scenario where Windows doesn’t dominate.

Right now, there’s no serious competition to Office, which gives Microsoft an incredible opportunity: Apple’s iWork suite is decent but has too many deficiencies to take on Office broadly. Quickoffice is in a similar position. And those SharePoint apps are mere fleas on the Microsoft elephant.

But given time, Apple iWork and Quickoffice could become serious Office competitors. Or perhaps the open source LibreOffice project, which has mobile ambitions, could outflank a Windows-bound Microsoft Office.

Microsoft’s retreat into Windows is also iffy because Windows 8 shows several signs of mediocrity. There’s a strong possibility that Windows 8 will get little traction in the marketplace, given both the loud complaints about it and low developer uptake. From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 systems will be a weird mix of touch and nontouch interfaces as users switch between the Windows 7 and Metro modes, for example.

Windows RT tablets look especially dubious as they will run only the Metro part of Windows 8 and have little serious software available. They will come with a special version of Office that Microsoft has yet to show publicly, but people I know who’ve seen it in tightly controlled private demos are not happy with it. If the pathetic version of Office that Microsoft has offered for years for first Windows Mobile and now Windows Phone is any indication of the Windows RT version, Microsoft will be out of the Office game on its own tablets, with a Metro version that people dislike and a Windows 7 version that requires a traditional PC environment for use.

Plus, to be managed by IT, Windows RT tablets will — initially, at least — require the use of Microsoft System Center 2012, rather than the Exchange ActiveSync policies commonly implemented to manage iOS and Android devices already in the enterprise. This will add to the complexity of managing tablets that IT isn’t so certain about in the first place, whereas the iPad is now accepted when it comes to business demand and manageability. IT may like Microsoft, but it dislikes vendor-generated complexity even more.

It’s time for Microsoft to embrace and extend the iPad When you put all this together, you can see that Microsoft’s strategy to isolate the iPad from its Office and SharePoint technologies could easily backfire and instead sequester Office and SharePoint from the greater mobile market, where the growth actually is. Simply put, Windows 8 could be the ball and chain that drags down Office and SharePoint, as iPad and Android users discover there’s life without Office and SharePoint.

To prevent that fate, Microsoft should untie Office and SharePoint from Windows. Doing so — coupled with effective, enticing ports of those products to iOS, OS X, and Android — would give Microsoft productivity platform dominance across most of the computing market. In other words, the iPad could be a great benefit to Microsoft’s software business — a new platform for Microsoft’s historic strategy of “embrace and extend” to win in markets where it had little presence, as it did in the Internet and in the server realm.

If Windows 8 and RT turn out to be successes, that would be icing on a very large cake.

The key is for Microsoft to rethink itself as a productivity company rather than an OS company. If it wants encouragement, it should look to Apple. Some years ago, Apple dropped the word “Computer” from its name and reinvented itself as an entertainment and apps platform company that also makes and sells computers. It’s now the most valuable company in the world, far from the basket case that Microsoft helped rescue in 1997.

Microsoft needs a similar reinvention for its user-facing business, as its circle-the-wagons strategy will certainly backfire. The iPad is just the ticket as its new vehicle.

This article, “Why Microsoft’s anti-iPad strategy will backfire,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.