Microsoft is planning to offer up software for the iPhone. A recent interview noted that Microsoft developers are looking into a variety of possibilities including Office functionality on the iPhone.

Tom Gibbons, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group (wow, that’s a mouthful) recently told Fortune magazine:

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone…To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now. We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us confidence to be able to do something. The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We’re still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It’s just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we’ll really get our head wrapped around that…”

It should prove interesting to see what Microsoft develops for the iPhone. With Apple’s support for Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server and ActiveSync protocol, there are a lot of possibilities here. Seems as though Microsoft would be smart to take a piece of the iPhone App ‘Pie’ so-to-speak.

[via InformationWeek]

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written by Mr. Mayor \\ tags: iPhone SDK, Mac Office, Microsoft, Tom Gibbons