Ohhh Microsoft! It’s amicable that your new CEO (who isn’t me!) has seen fit to release Office for iOS but you haven’t, really. You’ve released iWork (Keynote, Numbers and Pages) competitors, not an iWork killer. To do that, there was one thing you needed to release: Outlook.

When you consider the modern corporate work place and the de-facto software combination of Windows and Office, there’s one key piece of software that bridges the two. Outlook.

When you consider that from any Office application you can send what you’re working on as an email or invite someone to collaborate on something, Outlook is involved. It functions as semi CRM for many with it’s contact management and scheduling. All of this handled by Exchange was one of the key reasons for the dominance of BlackBerry (formally RIM) for so long in the business world.

If we take a quick look at productivity tools in the modern mobile workspace, we have:

• iOS, that brings the aforementioned iWork suite and has separate OS level applications for managing calendars, contacts, reminders, notes and email with management and storage through iCloud.
• Android, which has access to all of Google’s documents suite, Gmail, calendars, contacts and is all stored through Google Drive.
• Windows, with the complete Office suit and using SkyDrive for storage.

Each of these services are accessible through web browsers, which puts them all, theoretically on a level playing field. That’s all very nice but this is where Microsoft’s miss opportunity is even more blatant. Outlook on the iPad could have been (and may very well be) the best productivity tool available on iOS.

The Mail app on iOS is plagued with bugs and doesn’t support power users. The incremental upgrades over the years have been nice but more of a reactionary necessity, rather than pushing things forwards. (Side note, wouldn’t it have been nice if Apple had bought Sparrow, which went to Google, or Mailbox, that went to Dropbox.) 

Outlook on iOS could have all the productivity features of the desktop version (Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes etc) and the power user features that have made it ubiquitous in business. With the Exchange backbone, providing a fully synced service and SkyDrive integration for attachments and collaboration.

Perhaps Microsoft are working on this and it will arrive in due course, should Office on the iPad do well that is. There’s a real opportunity here for Microsoft, please don’t go squandering it.

In the mean time, I’ve knocked together a (very) quick idea of how the Mail view could work as inspiration for the team at Redmond:

More info on Office for iPad. Thanks to Teehan+lax for the iPad.