Office for iPad Nathan Olivarez-giles for The Wall Street Journal
The session included several touches characteristic of Mr. Nadella. His dress—dark jeans, a fitted polo shirt and a pair of his familiar sleek eyeglasses—
was more casual than Mr. Ballmer's typical khaki-and-blazer wardrobe.
Continuing a habit of dropping literary references, Mr. Nadella leaned on lines from T.S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding," an admonition to remember the
lessons of the past, to explain how he was seeing Microsoft with a fresh eye after 22 years at the company.
"You should never cease from exploration, and at the end of all exploring you arrive where you started and know the place for the very first time," said Mr.
Nadella, paraphrasing the Eliot poem. "For me that has never been more true."
Mr. Nadella's strategy session included a demonstration of Office for the iPad. The software has been reworked so the features and menu options work well on
the touchscreen device. Wall Street analysts have been enthused about the revenue potential for putting Office on many of the 190 million iPads sold since
2010.
Full use of the Office iPad app is limited to subscribers to Office 365, an online-friendly version that users "rent" for an annual subscription rather than
buy to install on their computers. For consumers, Office 365 costs $99.99 a year.
Thursday afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted on Twitter, "Welcome to the iPad and the App Store," and he included Mr. Nadella's Twitter user name.
In another move, Mr. Nadella and other Microsoft executives said they are unifying several pieces of company software to help corporations keep tabs on all
their employees computers, smartphones and tablets—no matter whether those devices are Windows-powered, or run software from Apple or Google.
The mobile-device management software helps companies delete sensitive information if an employee loses his corporate phone, for example, and lets workers
download proprietary company apps on their personal computing devices.
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