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OFFICE 365 GOES ON THE IPAD Featured

Satya Nadella, Microsoft New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella held his first press conference this week and, as expected, announced the availability of Office 365 on Apple's iPad. That was simply the major piece of evidence of Nadella's emphasis. His statements revolved around the theme of having products available across every platform and every device and that included every telephone, not just on Microsoft devices or PCs. "Today is just one aspect of overall strategy," Nadella said.

"I was talking about the most critical piece of innovation—The interaction of mobility and cloud." Next week, he will be addressing plans further. Obviously, the Dynamics line is well below the threshold of such briefings, but there is one thing that should be of interest to the general accounting community, the availability of Excel on the iPad as part of the Office suite. The touch-enabled software is already available for download at the Microsoft App Store. The company said the product corrects layout problems that users experienced when accessing files they had saved on Microsoft's cloud storage service, OneDrive. Documents can be read and presented for free but users need an Office363 subscription for writing and editing. Those are available for up to five computers and five smartphones at $100 a year. A personal version for one computer and one tablet costs $70 a year. The subscription also includes 20GB of OneDrive storage. In another move that takes the emphasis off Windows, the company changed the name of its cloud platform from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. That news also came this week, delivered on the Windows Azure Team Blog. The post by Microsoft's Steve Martin goes into the vow to provide the cloud on every device. "Our commitment to deliver an enterprise-grade cloud platform for the world's applications is greater than ever," Martin says. "Today we support one of the broadest set of operating systems, languages, and services of any public cloud—from Windows, SQL and .NET to Python, Ruby, Node.js, Java, Hadoop, Linux, and Oracle." This answers a frequent criticism from rival SAP that Microsoft does not want to provide choice to users.

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