Microsoft is pushing their Office platform further with an annoucement today that will see their Office suite pre-installed on tablets from the likes of Sony, LG and other vendors, furthering their existing arrangement with Samsung and Dell announced in March.
The core agreement appears to be the same as we saw with the Dell and Samsung deal, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype being pre-installed on tablets. The first of the rank is the new Sony Xperia Z4 tablet which will carry all these apps as part of the default load.
In all, there are 31 companies who Microsoft have signed up for the deal, though Sony and LG are by far the largest. The other companies who will include Office titles are:
- Axdia International GMBH – Germany
- Cube – China
- DL – Brazil
- General Procurement – United States
- Grupo Nucleo – Argentina
- Haier – China
- Inco – Mexico
- Ionik GBMH – Germany
- Iview – United States and Latam
- LG – Global
- Multilaser – Brazil
- Noblex – Argentina
- Pacific (Vulcan) – Mexico
- Philco – Argentina
- Positivo – Brazil
- Prestigio – EMEA
- Sony – Global
- Teclast – China
- TMAX Digital – North America
- Wortmannn – Germany
Microsoft has advised that they intend to bring other companies on board with the arrangement, so we could be seeing even more tablets with Office pre-installed in the near future.
Watching the AAA ep215 video, yesterday, at about the 52 minute mark, Dan nailed why MS being preinstalled on devices is a GoodThing.
The BYOD Enterprise market.
MS Office is a mainstay suite in Business.
Add in that Android M is intended to target the enterprise market, and MS Office being preinstalled, and the Knox stuff being added to Android M, it makes M very enterprise friendly.
Jeni THANK YOU!!! Finally a positive and thought out response. Yes you are right about filling space on a low storage device however these days with the price of flash a starting point of 32 GB is not a stretch to expect. The argument should be if they are going to put on bloatware (some is good some is not, usual carrier crap is never good) then they need to expand the storage to account for that. You often have some great thoughts on very valid comments but they are drowned out by the slogans you so often use that… Read more »
Frankly, given how the amount of memory taken up by the OS seems to only ever increase, and the reducing cost of memory, the time has probably come for manufacturers to start making 32GB the minimum capacity on all mid to high end phones.
Ugh. Another Microsoft tax.
Joy.
More unwanted, unneeded, and unasked bloatware chewing up what little on-board storage space there is on our new devices.
What’s the betting that this junk will also be set as System and we won’t be allowed to uninstall it?
You must be fun at parties…
You’re not speaking for me when you say that Office is unwanted
I was not saying that MS Office on Android is unwanted by its users.
I was saying that since devices have a very limited amount of user accessible on-board storage, pre-installing large apps is unwanted bloatware, because such apps chew even more into the available on-board user storage.
Look, it seems obvious to me what you meant, but regarding the bloatware issue, you’re just going to have to accept that having undeletable apps preinstalled on your phone is reality that can’t be changed no matter how much one whines about it. I mean, even Google puts bloatware on your phone. There are some Google apps that I don’t use and would remove from my phone if I could, but I can’t. And it’s not like these Microsoft apps will take up a lot of space anyway. Unless your phone comes with gigabytes worth of bloatware (Samsung I’m looking… Read more »
Then say that first up Jeni. Think for once
You are pathetic Jeni. Can you please focus on heels for men and makeup to cover a 5 o’clock shadow before you make thesee pathetic comments