When I first started hearing rumors about Microsoft Office on the iPad, I was very excited. Now, this was way back when the iPad was first launched in 2010. I thought that putting productivity software onto a tablet could really change computing. But years passed with no Word (no pun intended) and the PC market shrank, tablets and smartphones started eating what little was left of that market, and I just didn't care how I wrote words onto a digital page. I think for some, Microsoft Office or Word to be exact, was synonymous with typing something on the computer. "Oh, do you have Word?" "Can you send me a .doc of that file?" "Hold on, let me open Word and see if I can find what we're looking for." Yeah... Word was the equivalent of the Kleenex.
That was years ago which was a time before tablet computing (2009). Now I can write by swiping, tapping, touching, gesturing, dictating, and good old fashioned keyboard typing. But input is just one aspect of writing. Input is the "how." It's the "where" that seemed to fade away once new platforms were developed like Google Docs (now called Google Drive), which enabled these highly portable devices to have an anywhere-resume button on writing your latest chapter for that novel you've been writing...
Also, there was the HUGE fact that we didn't have the equivalent of a Microsoft Word for emerging platforms. We had and still have Simplenote, Evernote, Springpad, and a massive amount of tether-able apps which connect to cloud storage services such as Box and Dropbox.
So yeah, Microsoft today announced Microsoft Office for iOS and Android. But do we really care anymore? I sure as hell don't. I bought Pages a long time ago and to be honest, I've always preferred Pages (and *cough,* *cough* Open Office's Writer) over Word. I just couldn't justify spending piles of dough each time Word had a minor update for doing something so very, very basic. And now, you have to pay a subscription fee if you want to use Office on a tablet or PC. To be fair, my needs aren't your needs but I had to take some kind of angle here and if writing is your priority, you don't really need to waste your hard earned dollars on something that is available for free. Let the comments for why you need to have a powerful word processor commence!
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