Suite anticipation, said The Daily. The News Corp iPad mag broke the news this morning that Microsoft was about to submit its productivity suite to Apple for review. They even had a photo of the app running on an iPad to back up their claim — which they triple watermarked for some reason. The outlet specluated that the app could launch in the “coming weeks.” But then Microsoft responded, telling ZDNet that “The Daily’s story is not a picture of a real Microsoft software product.”
I reached out to The Daily’s Apps & Tech Editor Peter Ha for confirmation. Having personally worked with him for a couple of years here at TechCrunch, I knew he was not one to run a story of this magnitude without plenty of fact checking. Sure enough, they did their homework and Ha stands by the story and pic.
We’ve been chasing this story down for weeks. We did not fabricate the image and Microsoft isn’t denying the existence of Office for iPad. All this fuss over a photo is nonsense. The story is real.
We also got confirmation from local sources in Seattle, who assure us that the software is real and being developed in-house. However, as the build in the picture is far from final, Microsoft can deny (in its overly specific way) that it’s not a real product.