Microsoft to develop iPhone apps?

According to a Fortune report, a team of software engineers from Microsoft has been evaluating iPhone SDK for over a week now. Microsoft is not sure whether they will build any software yet, but they are very keen to find out.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” told Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group. “To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now.”

Curiously, Mac unit which ports Microsoft software like Office, Expression and Messenger to Mac, provides third of the revenues for the Specialized Devices and Applications Group, which also includes Windows Embedded, Microsoft Hardware, Automotive Business Unit and Microsoft Surface Computing. Together they made over $1billion sales, with Mac unit providing $350million.

Mac world is quite profitable for Microsoft, and it would be wise to think that they will not leave iPhone unconquered either.

Since Mac unit is the largest Mac developer group outside of Apple, and together with the knowledge of Microsoft software they could come up with pretty powerful stuff like Microsoft Outlook for syncing with Exchange server, and much more!

“We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us confidence to be able to do something,” Gibbons said. “The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We’re still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It’s just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we’ll really get our head wrapped around that.”

TellMe, a voice recognition unit, is also eying iPhone. Based on their current software it would be safe to assume that they will make voice search app since they said they need voice recognition and location-based information support.

“If the SDK supports these things,” McCue told Fortune in February, “we’re absolutely going to get a version out there as soon as we can, get TellMe out there on the iPhone.”

Knowing Microsoft, and their development schedules, it might mean that we will not have any software for a while. But hopefully they won’t miss the train and others filling the niche. Overall we expect great programs like Word with the ability to use Sharepoint services, Outlook and even Messenger.

Thanks: MacDailyNews

Tags: app, Apple, application, apps, iPhone, Mac, Microsoft, News, OS

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