Steve Ballmer spoke yesterday on Bloomberg's Businessweek about Office 2013 (not to be confused with Office 365, Microsoft's online suite), Office for iPad, and Dropbox.
Let's start with what he said about Dropbox, the cloud-based service for all operating systems that we have all come to love. According to Ballmer, Dropbox is Mickey Mouse, saying that the 100 million users it has is a very small number and that Microsoft has many more users in Office. And he went on to say that if you want to compare it with cloud services, Hotmail and SkyDrive are still ahead by a long way.
Ballmer clarified that he has nothing against Dropbox, but said that it is a small startup that has done well and nothing more.
For us, Dropbox is much more than a "small" startup that has done well, and our question is why neither Microsoft nor Apple have been interested in buying it or even improving their own corresponding service.
As for Office for iPad, although he didn't say anything directly, he hinted that it might be coming soon:
I don't have much to say on the subject. We're proud of our product, that's why it's out there. It makes sense for it to be used on devices like Macs and PCs, so we developed a way for people to access it almost always through a browser. We'll see what the future holds.
Although we have seen several leaks about an Office for iPad in the past, Microsoft has not yet made an official announcement. The reason is probably because they are in a dilemma. They want to sell Office but they know that its support on their tablets is the only advantage they have over the iPad. By releasing Office for iPad, their tablets will lose that advantage, potentially reducing sales. On the other hand, of course, Microsoft's tablets have not sold at all, so maybe they will finally decide to release Office for iPad and make some money from it.
