When Microsoft announced Office for iOS, it left out an all important compatibility — the Apple iPad. It’s an omission that many thought was to prevent it losing a unique selling point of Surface RT, but according to the company’s outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, it’s coming.
During the Gartner Symposium, where Eric Schmidt made some rather bizarre comments about the Android operating system, Ballmer spoke about a wide range of topics — as well as the reasoning behind the absence of Office for iPad.
According to Ballmer Microsoft is waiting for a touch-first user interface for Office before releasing a version on iPad, with Windows 8 users also forced to wait for a touch optimised version of the Office suite.
If you’re hoping for Outlook on iPad though, you may have to kiss that dream goodbye — with Ballmer claiming that it’s ‘hard to believe Apple will let us make that available’ despite numerous third-party email clients in the App Store.