James A. Martin of CIO.com reports that the market is now providing iPad access to cloud versions of apps that make up Microsoft’s Office suite of programs. That’s the genuine Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although your docs live on a remote server.
OnLive Desktop (free; iPad only) from OnLive, Inc., which offers full access to cloud-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your iPad.
There’s a serious cottage industry (a matured vendor group, to be fair) of suppliers who sell iPad apps to create documents for spreadsheets, presentations, and written docs. Apple itself has released Pages and Numbers apps, and each is careful to offer a Save As option into the Microsoft doc formats. This link-to-Microsoft move might be in advance of full iOS apps for each of its programs.
This changes the game for the smaller vendors such as ByteSquared (OfficeHD for iPad) Quickoffice with its apps of the same name, plus many others. BrainShark was selling a PowerPoint slide sharing app and service at the latest Macworld. Smaller companies always live in the shadow of a larger competitor entering their market. It seems to be happening in the Office world. Now the innovation and interface of these earlier entries is going to be crucial to keep them living in that world.
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