Yesterday I posted about reports coming from The Daily that Office for the iPad was very real, and was to be submitted to the iTunes App Store soon and then be available in a few weeks after, but Microsoft is saying otherwise.

A tweet from one of Microsoft’s Twitter accounts says, “[g]reat respect for The Daily but regrettably someone is giving them bad info, and that’ll be clear in the ‘coming weeks.’” So now we have The Daily saying it’s coming, Microsoft saying they have been misinformed and that the software in the image is not theirs, so I guess that’s that, right?

Well, not so fast. Shortly thereafter Mary Jo Foley, of the All About Microsoft Blog, received a tweet from Peter Ha (the one who posted the Office for iPad article on The Daily) saying that not only is the image not fabricated, but someone from Microsoft demoed Office for the iPad to him. Plus, according to a further tweet by Peter Ha, Microsoft isn’t going to be very happy with their next follow up, whatever that means.

You can read the article Bad day at the Office on The Daily for more information.

If the reports from The Daily are correct, Office for the iPad could be arriving within a matter of weeks.

Source: The Daily

The Daily had a short hands-on with the app, and it appears to support Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, along with a Metro-style like layout of the application. These supported documents can be edited both locally and online (SkyDrive and SharePoint, presumably). The app has, once again — reportedly, just been finished and not yet submitted to the iTunes App Store, but should soon and then it is just a matter of waiting for the app to be approved.

Currently Microsoft has a OneNote app available for both the iPhone and iPad, but The Daily’s sources claim that there is an upcoming update to the app which would give it a more Metro feel to it, like the ones shown off for Windows on ARM (WOA). There is also the possibility that the OneNote app could be merged with this Office suite app, though the image from The Daily only shows Word, Excel and PowerPoint icons.

There is no word on how much this app would cost, if at all, and Microsoft is not working on an Android version of Office.

Last year I decided that, as many others do, I would make a list of predictions for the year. My predictions included such products as Windows 8, Windows Phone 7, and even Chrome OS. So why don’t we take a look at how I did.

Windows 8

I said that we wouldn’t know much about Windows 8 until the summer time of last year, but I was wrong on that count. It wasn’t until BUILD in September that Sinofsky got on stage and gave a very detailed presentation of Windows 8. Even now, there are a lot of questions to be answered about Windows 8 — such as its launch date, or even a time frame for the launch.

I also said that there would be a beta release, that would only be available for desktops. Microsoft released a Developer Preview, with the Windows 8 Beta release coming sometime early this year — so I was wrong there. I guess I was somewhat right, as the ARM version of Windows 8 was not available and that version is primarily targeted at tablets, but then again the x86/x64 version is just as capable of running on tablets as well (so long as Intel gets their act together).

No surprise: Windows 8 did not RTM this year, as some predicted.

My final prediction was the further compartmentalization of the Windows operating system, and that the tablet version would remove the GUI and legacy support. This is indeed the case for the ARM version (it is still unclear as to whether the desktop would be disabled on x86/x64 versions if they were put on tablets), but that’s because the applications would have to be modified in order to run on the ARM architecture. Microsoft has said they have absolutely no plans to allow older applications to run on ARM, so in a way, they are removing legacy support.

 Windows Phone 7

“Microsoft will continue to not get it,” that’s what I said last year in regards to Windows Phone 7. By that I meant Microsoft would not update the phone as quickly as they should in order to catch up with the competition.

In a way, they certainly didn’t get it… It wasn’t until late September that Windows Phone “Mango” was finally released, which was an entire year after the original product launch. Also, it took a couple of months before any phones designed for “Mango” came out, which is awfully slow — but some did appear to be Windows Phone-specific phones, not Android phones running Windows Phone 7.

Sales also remained dismal, and they will until Microsoft gets their act together (and rumors about Microsoft and Nokia’s plans seem to address the current sales issues), so I was definitely right that “Microsoft will continue to not get it.” But that’s not surprising, as it takes Microsoft awhile to get it.

Bing

Bing did pretty well this year (not financially), growing from 11.8% market share to 15%, and with Yahoo! included the duo went from 28.2% market share up to 30.1%. The growth of the two doesn’t seem so great, which is due to Yahoo losing a couple percentage points in their market share. I predicted that by now Bing alone would be at an 18% market share, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

I also said that HTML5 Bing would have been out 6 months ago, with that cool video background and instant search along with other updates. That never happened (the video background has happened, though), but a few people (including me) did start to see the new Bing, which then disappeared not long after.

Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer remained at Microsoft, also not a surprise. A few months ago approval ratings of Microsoft executives were taken, and Steve Ballmer received a 92% approval rating. That doesn’t seem too bad, except for the fact that the previous year that number was at 95% (Bill Gates has a 99.1% approval rating).

PC Sales

We kept hearing news article after news article last year of the forecast of PC sales being “slashed,” it was the hot topic of the year, after all. But in reality, PC sales did not stop, and they did not stagnate — as some seemed to think was happening or was going to happen. Sure, the growth was only around 3% year-over-year, but when you sell some 350 million+ computers every single year, 3% of that number is 10.5 million.

iPhone

I was completely wrong in every regard here. The iPhone 5 didn’t come out, it was the iPhone 4S (but it didn’t have LTE, as I predicted), and it came out on multiple carriers in the U.S. as well.

Chromebooks

Google hasn’t given any details on Chromebook sales, but according to ZDNet they sold horribly (in the range of only tens of thousands, if that). But who would want to buy a $500 machine that can only surf the web and be valuable if connected to the Internet? Apparently very few.

So there you have it, a review of my predictions from last year. I didn’t miss all my predictions, but then again none of them were very extreme… Maybe I will make some more extreme predictions next time .

The above is just one of the many slides leaked to the web containing information for how Microsoft partners making Windows 7 tablets should market their device against the iPad. Some of this includes Windows 7 having a “UI familiar to most end users,” Windows supporting the “largest breath of Printing Hardware,” a “Rich, searchable, file system,” but also that Windows 7 tablets can also be useful offline, whereas the iPad is mostly useful when online.

This has many people questioning whether Microsoft really gets what we (the consumers) want when it comes to tablets, which is no surprise. It is no surprise that no one put a little more thought into why Microsoft would give such lame marketing reasons to partners, because other companies do it as well.

Yup, every time Steve Jobs comes out on stage and announces the new iPhone and declares it the best iPhone ever (which it, of course, is). The new version is better than the older one and you’re “just gonna love it” (which people do). Is that wrong? No, of course not, because they aren’t lying, but everyone knows a newer version will come out more capable and feature packed than the last (which, once again, is to be expected).

What’s my point, you ask? It is quite simple: Windows 7 is what Microsoft has to work with. Let’s be honest, it sucks on tablets, it wasn’t designed for tablets, and it will never work well when it comes to tablets.

We can only speculate what Microsoft has up their sleeves for Windows 8, but we can only assume it will be much more capable of running and working well on tablets. However, until then, Windows 7 is what Microsoft has to work with, and what they will continue to work with in the tablet market until they have an answer.

While this does not excuse Microsoft’s very late response to the tablet market, it does supply logic as to why Microsoft is trying to make it appear as though they believe Windows 7 is the answer to tablets. After all, who wants to be first to the market? If there is no competition what’s the fun of being the only option consumers will choose? Oh, wait.

Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft embraced a new security model called SDL or the Security Development Lifecycle, through the adoption of the new model Microsoft products have become more secure over time. If you weren’t aware, Windows 7 and Windows Vista are much more secure than Windows XP. Microsoft outlined to the world their new security model and Microsoft will now begin offering consultation for implementing SDL. After all, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link (so the operating system is only as secure as the least secure component or application on the system). You can read more on the Softpedia article.

More iPad 2 rumors, this time it is a bit less of a rumor, according to iPodNN. It appears iOS 4.3 Beta 2 confirms a camera in the new iPad due to the arrival of photo apps in the release. Okay, we get it people… We all knew from the get go that the next version of the iPad would have a camera, that’s just how Apple rolls.

Get ready for another Microsoft Security Essentials update, this time to the antimalware engine, says Softpedia. Microsoft says that this is “part of regular update of our antimalware technology to address the latest in the threat landscape.” Last week Microsoft released Microsoft Security Essentials v2 with an antimalware engine version of 1.1.6402.0 and the new versions build number should be v1.1.650X.0, to be released later today.

Steve Ballmer went to Washington DC yesterday and met with a number of U.S. and Chinese business leaders along with U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao. The reason Ballmer was invited: to discuss the serious IP violations occurring in China, along with piracy, according to WinRumors. WinRumors points out that Bill Gates met with the Chinese President in 2006, after which Jintao required all computers manufactured in China were required to come with a licensed operating system. We shall see what Jintao will do this time.

To top it all off: more ComputerWorld link bait… Yes, Will Apple without Steve Jobs suffer like Microsoft without Bill Gates? Uh, no, I don’t believe so. Steve Jobs has formed Apple the way he wants, and whether he is there or not, they will undoubtedly continue on the path Steve Jobs started, with some variations possibly. Sure, once Bill Gates left Microsoft, we had Windows Vista, but now we have Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Internet Explorer 9 and so on and so forth. Bill Gates was a very intelligent man, but not much of a visionary anymore, he was more symbolic than anything. What I am trying to get at is this: No, Apple will not suffer, they may stumble a bit, but they will get right back to where they were before or better. Besides, Steve Jobs isn’t dead.