Ulterior motives, or just plain good old fashioned leaks? This side of Ford’s Alan Mulally, Stephen Elop is said to be the leading candidate to take over the role of CEO from Steve Ballmer.
Sure, there are a number of other people in the running — several of them insiders — but the Nokia boss has a better shot than most. Nevertheless, he has been in the news a bit these past week or so, with some significant views to his name.
In an earlier report by Bloomberg we learned that Elop is open to getting rid of the Bing and Xbox divisions in case he is elected Microsoft CEO. No confirmation that he will, just that he would consider.
And now the same source adds that Elop would speed up development of the Office productivity suite in order to bring it on more and more platforms, including iOS and Android. Natively, that is, and not the cloud powered, subscription based Office 365.
As of right now, Microsoft is rumored to be in the process of porting over its industry standard suite of applications to these competing platforms, though there is no information on when these would see daylight on iOS and Android.
Stephen Elop, however, seems ready to put the weight behind the process, if this report is to be believed. In other words, he wants Microsoft to focus on its core products, its core competencies.
And when it comes to core competencies, it does not get more core than Windows, Office and cloud.
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Microsoft needs to continue to advance it’s own mobile platform before it tries to enhance others. Continue to grow Windows Phone and your share in tablet, and then worry about everyone else. Microsoft is making plenty of money on Office now with it only on Windows-based devices. Most with other devices still go back to a PC part of the time. They don’t use Google Docs or iWorks 100% of the time. Microsoft has time to convert them. IF they release Office for other platforms it should be more limited than the RT version