Redmond reacts after Apple’s comments made during the OS X Mavericks launch

Oct 24, 2013 09:46 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft claims that it makes the number one productivity tablet on the market
   Microsoft claims that it makes the number one productivity tablet on the market

Redmond has reacted pretty quickly to the comments Apple’s officials made during the OS X Mavericks launch, defending its own products and criticizing some of the products the Cupertino-based firm is so aggressively promoting these days.

Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of Communications at Microsoft, published a lengthy blog post to explain that the Surface tablet really is the number one productivity device of its kind on the market, while also blasting Apple’s strategy of retailing the iWork productivity suite as an alternative for the Office solution.

Shaw explained that “Microsoft understands how people work better than anyone else on the planet,” the Surface tablet is just a fruit of the closer connection between the company and its customers.

“We created the personal computing revolution by giving people around the world a low-cost, powerful, easy-to-use device that helped them accomplish an unbelievable array of tasks,” he said.

“Let’s be clear – helping folks kill time on a tablet is relatively easy. Give them books, music, videos and games, and they’ll figure out the rest. Pretty much all tablets do that. But helping people be productive on a tablet is a little trickier. It takes an understanding of how people actually work, how they get things done, and how to best support the way they do things already.”

As far as iWork is concerned, Shaw claims that Apple’s new strategy doesn’t make much sense, especially because this particular productivity suite “has never gotten much traction.”

“[It] was already priced like an afterthought, it’s hardly that surprising or significant a move. And it doesn’t change the fact that it’s much harder to get work done on a device that lacks precision input and a desktop for true side-by-side multitasking,” he noted.

Shaw ends by calling Apple’s software “struggling” and “lightweight,” which makes Apple’s recent efforts nothing more than some attempts “to play catch up.”