Microsoft Looking to Bring Office to the iPhone…Why?

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop suggested that Microsoft is actively working to bring its Office suite of productivity applications to the Apple iPhone sometime in the not too distant future. When pushed during an interview to elaborate, Elop admitted that the software wasn’t quite ready yet and that users should keep a watchful eye.

Currently, the iPhone OS ships with built-in read-only capabilities for Microsoft Office documents. Users attempting to make changes to Word, Excel, etc. files have had little options.

I’m curious to know exactly what types of updates these users are looking to make? In my experience, most of the users who access Office documents on the go simply view them quickly to get the information they need then later open the files on a computer to edit them and do the real work. I simply can’t imagine doing a vlookup() or countif() on my iPhone — don’t even get me started on pivot tables.

The point is it’s simply not practical for getting any real work done. Sure Microsoft will sell plenty of copies because of the novelty generated if they’re actually able to deliver on this. But as someone who spends most of my time in Microsoft Office from Monday to Friday, I can’t see how Office on the iPhone will realistically make me better equipped to do my job.