Microsoft is rejecting statements made by one of its own employees.
Sometimes when you’re a huge multinational firm, you may end up with people in some countries that don’t get the same memos as everyone else. That is what appears to have happened with Microsoft’s team in the Czech Republic.
Product manager Petr Bobek was quoted by Theverge.com as saying that Microsoft’s Office software suite would be making an official entry to the world of Android and iOS, as well as Windows Phone and Symbian.
As to be expected, this generated a significant amount of buzz among the mobile community, especially since nothing had been announced from Microsoft’s more prominent team here in the US.
And that is because it was a mistake. “The information shared by our Czech subsidiary is not accurate. We do not have anything further to share at this time,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Obviously, Microsoft will need to embrace these emerging platforms more and more as the market for traditional computing continues to decline. There are already many mobile apps that allow users to read and edit Office documents, but Microsoft does not offer an official all-in-one solution for these platforms.
There is an argument that Microsoft should only allow a true mobile Office solution on Windows Phone, so it can finally gain a competitive edge with that platform. It seems unlikely that the Czech Microsoft team would just make this stuff up, though, so we’ll see. It seems like an official announcement might be imminent.
