Apple Hiring Developers For New iOS Microsoft Office Surrogate Apps

BusinessInsider’s Jay Yarow notes that when Apple unleashed the iPad on the world in 2010, it also rolled out a complimentary suite of Microsoft Office-like applications with relatively little fanfare: sort of bare bones iOS versions of its iWork desktop applications: “Pages” for word processing, “Numbers” for spreadsheets, and “Keynote” for presentations.

Partly thanks to Microsoft’s having never released a version of its Office productivity suite for the iPad, the iOS versions of iWork have been strong sellers, with Pages being the most popular paid app of all-time, Keynote tenth and Numbers eleventh.

However, there’s been little change in the apps since they were rolled out more than three years ago, aside from a few minor tweaks.

Yarow suggests that could be about to change, with Apple having been ramping up hiring of software engineers, and more recently quality assurance engineers for iWork since February, according to MacRumors, suggesting that a finished product is approaching the testing stage.

Bringing out updated and enhanced iOS iWorks apps makes excellent sense, what with Microsoft tipping neither indication nor inclination to release Office for iPad any time soon, and keeping mobile Office and exclusive for its own Surface and other Windows tablets an explicable strategy.

Ditto for Google, Yarow observes, with no Google Drive spreadsheet and word-processing apps released for the iPad. All the more reason for Apple to go its own way with productivity support.

You can read Jay Yarow’s commentary here:
http://read.bi/10oTZ0A