CloudOn brings Microsoft Office to Android tablets, gets Google Drive support
After releasing a major update to its iPad app last month, CloudOn is today bringing its Microsoft Office virtualization technology to Android tablets. — And, going alongside support for cloud storage services Dropbox …
Context & Ripple Effects
CloudOn's play is arbitrage on Microsoft's own licensing: it runs real Office on remote servers and streams the interface to tablets, so it shipped an iPad version first and a major update to that app just last month before extending the same technology to Android tablets. Storage is the connective tissue — Dropbox was already integrated, and Google Drive now joins it as a document source.
The story travelled unusually wide for a single app release, with pickups across Engadget, InfoWorld, Computerworld, The Next Web, SlashGear and others on or about May 9, 2012 — a sign that third-party Office-on-mobile was one of the contested questions of the tablet market at that point.
First-order effects
- Android tablet owners gain Office-compatible document creation and editing through CloudOn's virtualization app, closing a capability gap on a platform where Microsoft offered no tablet-native Office.
- Google Drive's addition gives CloudOn users two major cloud storage backends alongside Dropbox, making the app's usefulness dependent on which storage provider a user already pays for.
Second-order effects
- Cloud storage providers are now competing to be the default document layer for mobile productivity apps, since integration placement with apps like CloudOn drives which service holds users' files.
- A working virtualized Office on Android tablets raises the pressure on Microsoft to answer with its own tablet offering rather than cede the Android productivity experience to intermediaries streaming its software.
Third-order effects
- If virtualization remains the only route to Office on tablets, the economics favor whoever operates the server fleet — turning document editing into a hosted-service business and giving cloud providers leverage over file formats and defaults.
- The longer pattern points toward software vendors being forced into native cross-platform releases once third-party wrappers prove user demand on platforms the vendor has not served.
The trend: Mobile productivity is being filled in by third parties virtualizing incumbent desktop software, forcing vendors like Microsoft toward native tablet apps and making cloud storage the distribution battleground.