Microsoft Office in the Future: Android, iOS, Linux and Metro Versions

Microsoft has recently launched the new Office 2013, so the company can now fully focus on its plans to bring the productivity suite on a number of new platforms.

And according to sources familiar with the matter, Microsoft is pretty busy these days as it’s trying to push the Office productivity package well beyond the Windows environment.

Microsoft is reportedly already working on an iOS version of the new Office and, even though several executives have denied such a project, others have hinted that it could be released as soon as this year.

In addition, insiders are suggesting that Microsoft is also planning to tackle the Android market with a special build of its productivity software but, once again, the Redmond-based technology giant remains completely tight-lipped on this.

The most recent rumor points to a Linux build which pretty much makes sense given the fact that Android is a Linux-based platform.

Porting Office to Linux shouldn’t be too difficult once the Android version is ready to be released, so these two versions are very likely to see daylight sometime in the future.

Last but not least, Microsoft is also trying to make the most of its Metro/Modern flavor of the newly released Windows 8 operating system with a touch-optimized Office package.

OneNote and Lync are already available as Modern apps on both Windows 8 and Windows RT, so the company would only have to continue its work to make Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the other Office solutions compatible with the Metro UI.

“We're committed to delivering a full set of Office experiences on Windows 8. We've gotten a lot of experience from OneNote and Lync, and we're going to continue down that path,” Microsoft's Vice President of Office Program Management, P.J. Hough, said in a statement a few days ago, suggesting that work on a Metro version of Office had already started.