“The inevitable is happening,” Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool. “Microsoft is reportedly working on rolling out Microsoft Office in iPad form.”

“Apple sold 11.1 million iPad 2 tablets in its latest quarter alone, so clearly this is a booming computing market that the world’s largest software company needs to address,” Munarriz writes. “If Windows is starting to fade as an operating system of choice for light computers powered by Apple’s iOS and Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG ) Android, why should Microsoft’s productivity suite go down with the ship? Android and iOS weren’t even around five years ago, yet both platforms now have more than 200 million activated devices apiece.”

Munarriz writes, “Apple’s own Pages word processing and Numbers spreadsheet programs — as well as Quickoffice suite — have been among the top premium iPad apps since the tablet’s inception last year… Apple charges $9.99 for stand-alone versions of its Pages, Numbers, and Keynote iWork components… There’s really no way that Microsoft can win here. Sure, it can scale back the functionality of its tablet apps to justify the pricing discrepancy between its PC versions, but then it still has to compete with more full-featured dedicated apps… Tell me how this leads to folks sending more money to Microsoft in the future — because I don’t see it.”

Read more in the full article here.

James Kendrick writes for ZDNet, “This looming pricing dilemma is going to be one of the biggest threats Microsoft has had to deal with in a long time. It is unusual for a company to confront the damage it might do to a major segment of its own business, but that’s what it is facing. The company can’t (or shouldn’t) release a version of tablet apps for the competition (iPad) at higher than competitive prices, but pricing them properly could permanently affect a big portion of its core business. There should be some Microsoft executives having some late-night meetings in Redmond dealing with this.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Do not question Steve Ballmer. He knows exactly what he’s doing. We like his strategy. We like it a lot.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Edward Weber" for the heads up.]

Related article:
Microsoft working on Office for iPad, say sources – November 29, 2011