Yes, we’re talking about Microsoft Office suite, which is still an absentee from any tablet available in the market today. There are unofficial mobile office apps but there’s no official Office app by Microsoft to cater to the ‘office’ lovers for work related use.

But the current scenario of absence of ‘Office’ is not going to remain the same for too long. Microsoft is rigorously working on an official version of ‘Office’, exclusively for iPad.

As iPad commands over 80% of tablet market, we wouln’t be wrong to say that developing for iPad at the moment is equivalent to developing for the tablet market.

As tablets are becoming more capable and gaining mass popularity with time, Microsoft had to give in to this and just like it develops a separate native Office version for Mac(latest being Office 2011), there will soon be native ‘Office’ app for iPad.

This will serve many purposes for Microsoft and therefore, it’s a strategically correct move by the Redmund company for many reasons:

• There have been too many unofficial ‘mobile office’ apps with very limited capabilities. Official ‘Office’ app, meant for tablet sized devices will fill up the void space
• ‘Office’ desktop app is the second biggest profit-making avenues for Microsoft and ‘Office’ app for iPad, if competitively priced, will take no time in selling like a hot cake to a huge iPad market.
• Office app for iPad will also serve as a dry run for Microsoft to see how the users react to an official ‘Office’ app, specifically designed for a touch-friendly tablet. As Windows 8 tablets will hit the market next year, performance of ‘Office’ app for iPad will help Microsoft gauge the future market scenario pretty effectively.

The price tag, however, is going to be a challenge for Microsoft as ‘Office’ app for iPad will not be a success without the price being affordable to tablet buyers, especially when there’s already an iWorks by Apple for productivity work on iPad.

We will keep an eye over this and report further info as it arrives..

According to CNet, Microsoft had two internal teams, having non-coherent vision for tablet computing. One was led by the creator of Xbox godfather, J Allard and the other by Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows division.

J Allard was the pushing force behind Courier tablet and wanted the project to take off as an actual production unit. The only issue with Courier tablet was that it was powered by a modified version of Windows, probably not perfectly aligned with earlier Windows versions and had a different DNA than legacy Windows versions.

And it was indigestible for Sinofsky to drift away from Windows legacy in tablet computing, although tablet friendly Windows version was far from complete at that time.

In such a conflicting scenario, Steve Ballmer escalated the matter to Bill Gates for taking a final call on the fate of courier tablet. Bill Gates couldn’t digest the disruptive idea of specialized ‘courier’ tablet and hence scrapped the whole project there itself.

Since then, Microsoft started working aggressively on the development of tablet friendly version of Windows, which we now know as Windows 8.

Roots of Office productivity suite goes back in 1990s when the very first version of world’s most used productivity application suite was released for public use.

There came some intermediate version releases that did not have major feature updates to the productivity suite but after a gap of 2-3 years, major revisions of Office productivity suite kept hitting the market.

To have a strategic advantage and work in stealth mode, Microsoft has always used codenames to refer to products and the same case has been there with Microsoft Office versions.

Here’s an in-depth information about various version releases of Office suite along with its codenames, that were used by Microsoft to refer under-development versions.