Microsoft reveals upcoming Office for Windows Phone 8 features
Microsoft has revealed the look and feel for its future Office for Windows Phone 8 software today. In a company blog post, Microsoft's John Jendrezak details some of the upcoming features, improvements, and interface changes.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reveal slots into a deliberate two-week sequence from Microsoft: the full detail drop on Windows Phone 8's new Start Screen, multi-core support, VoIP and NFC on June 20, then Ballmer's customer preview of the next Office at office.com/preview on July 16 — a version delivered as a cloud service and built to harness Windows 8. John Jendrezak's blog post now extends that same design language down to the phone, showing what the suite looks like on the WP8 hardware the June announcement made possible.
The pickup breadth is notable for a blog-post story: ZDNet, Engadget, The Next Web, WMPoweruser and others all ran it on or about July 17, reflecting how much weight observers put on Office as the differentiator for a phone platform still fighting for app credibility. It lands amid a confirmed report that Microsoft is working behind the scenes to halt Google's encroachment on business software, even as a claim that it publicly dismissed Google Apps as a competitor went denied.
First-order effects
- Windows Phone 8 buyers and enterprise IT evaluators get their first concrete look at how Word, Excel and PowerPoint will behave on the new platform, making the OS easier to green-light against BlackBerry and iOS in corporate deployments.
- The mobile client is positioned as a companion surface to the cloud-delivered Office preview unveiled July 16, tying phone upgrades directly to the next Office cycle rather than shipping as an isolated app.
Second-order effects
- Google's Docs-and-Apps push into business software faces a rival whose mobile answer is native Office on every new Windows Phone, forcing the comparison onto devices where Google's own distribution is weakest.
- Phone OEMs building WP8 handsets gain a marquee preinstalled application to market against Android rivals that cannot bundle the full desktop-grade suite, sharpening licensing conversations around the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Office stops being a desktop product with mobile ports and becomes the connective tissue of a Windows-plus-cloud ecosystem spanning PC, tablet and phone — with subscription value, not per-copy sales, as the measure of the franchise.
- Mobile productivity suites harden into a platform-selection criterion for enterprises, meaning phone OS vendors increasingly compete on bundled document workflows rather than hardware specs alone.
The trend: Microsoft is stitching its Office franchise into every Windows surface ahead of the Windows 8 launch, using productivity software rather than handset hardware to close the gap with Google and Apple in mobile.