Apple Targets Microsoft Office...

Jim Wilson/The New York Times reports. 
At an event meant to feature its latest iPad tablet computing devices, Apple took aim at one of the biggest and seemingly unassailable businesses of its rival Microsoft, its Office software for tasks like word processing and spreadsheets. 

Apple said iWork, a set of applications for Macs, iPads and iPhones that essentially duplicates what Microsoft’s Office offers customers, would be free to anyone who bought a new Macintosh computer or mobile device from Apple. 

Each Apple app used to cost $10 apiece.  The latest version of the Macintosh operating system, Mavericks, will also be free. 

The pricing maneuver was perhaps the lone surprise at an Apple new media event here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As expected, Apple souped up its iPads with faster processors and zippier Internet connections. 

The company upgraded its iPad Mini, the smaller tablet, with a higher-resolution, 7.9-inch display. The full-size iPad, with a 9.7-inch screen, was renamed the iPad Air, because it has a slimmer design and has lost some weight. The smaller iPad starts at $400 and the bigger iPad will cost $500. Both will ship in November. 

“This is our biggest leap forward ever in a full-sized iPad,” said Philip W. Schiller, senior vice president for marketing at Apple. 

With its free software offering, Apple is capitalizing on strong growth in tablet computing sales and Microsoft’s reluctance to offer Office for the iPad. 

Tablets are devouring the PC market, which has long been Microsoft’s playing ground. About 120 million tablets were shipped in 2012, nearly seven times as many as in 2010, when the first Apple iPad was released, according to Gartner, a market research company. IDC, another research company, predicts that sales of tablets will surpass those of PCs in the fourth quarter of this year and on an annual basis in 2015. 

So far, Microsoft has had little success in that growing market. Its attempts to sell tablets have been failures, and Windows 8, which it has marketed as a software system for tablets and PCs, has gotten a chilly reception. What’s more, Microsoft still charges $120 for people who want to upgrade from the older Windows 7 system to Windows 8. 

That shift to mobile devices and low-cost software is why Microsoft is trying to shift from being a traditional software company into one that sells Internet services and devices, said Ross Rubin, an independent consumer technology analyst for Reticle Research. 

The company could reduce the upfront price for its software and charge people more over time for the services through subscriptions. And with the release on Tuesday of Microsoft’s new Surface tablets, the company is more aggressively marketing the online services available for it, like SkyDrive, a service for storing files on the Internet.