This morning we showed you an image that supposedly depicted Microsoft’s Office suite running on one of Apple’s iPads. We weren’t too sure just how legitimate the image might be, but looked at what it might be able to tell us, should it be genuine. In the hours since, there have been several follow-up comments regarding the picture, both from the site that sourced the image and Microsoft itself, that make for some interesting new developments.

The Daily’s Peter Ha is steadfastly defending that the picture is nothing less than the genuine article. According to him, a Microsoft employee was the one who shared this iPad version of Office with the site’s writers. If such an employee is going behind Microsoft’s back to provide info to the site, there may be even more interesting news coming soon, with Ha tweeting “If @Microsoft is pissed about what we published today on @Office for iPad, they likely won’t be happy with our follow up.”



As for Microsoft’s response, it initially just straight-up denied that image showed any Microsoft software, but since then its position has gotten a little less certain. It’s now saying that The Daily has “bad info”, but doesn’t specify just what’s supposed to be wrong. What it has offered, though, is that it will make things clear in just a few weeks’ time; that sort of sounds like an admission that there will an Office suite for the iPad, and Microsoft wants to reveal the nature of it on its own terms. Whatever the case actually is, we’re far from hearing the end of this story.

Source: Microsoft (Twitter), Peter Ha (Twitter)

Via: The Verge, ZDNet