Author: Lucy

This new milestone has suggested that the company’s strategy to cross platforms is a successful one.

According to the latest download figures, Microsoft Office apps have now been downloaded over 100 million times, which has indicated that despite a great deal of controversy surrounding the cross platform strategy that the company has adopted, it is paying off.

The suite of apps has been made available to users of Android, iOS and recently Windows Phone based devices.

The software and technology giant held its third quarter earnings call, last week, and revealed that its Microsoft Office apps have been doing very well on the operating systems of its rivals, Google and Apple. “We are clearly taking Office everywhere” explained the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, as it described the rapidly growing popularity of the suite of applications.

He went on to state that “Core to our mobile first strategy is to ensure that our service end points are on every mobile device, and to that end we have seen continued momentum with more than 100 million downloads of Office on iPhones, iPads, and Android tablets.”

Nadella pointed out that the cross platform versions of the Microsoft Office apps is only the start.

He also discussed the recent release of Outlook mobile apps on the Android and iOS platforms which occurred in the second quarter of this year. Moreover, Nadella also said that the company is making updates to its OneDrive applications and that said that there would very soon be a preview of an upcoming version of the Office software suite that has been designed for Mac computers. This, he said, means that the Office service is now being made available to users on more devices than ever before.

This represents considerable achievements for Microsoft, since the rise in use of Microsoft Office apps has also meant that there has been a notable increase in the subscriptions to Office 365. According to the figures cited by Nadella, that service is now seeing an average of 1 million new customers every month and that the company now has over 12 million subscribers to that service. That represents a very healthy growth of 35 percent over what it had been in the quarter before.

The social network is now in the process of creating its first application compatible with smartwatches.

Instagram has now announced that it is developing a new Apple Watch app that would provide its users with an alert as soon as there is a picture posted by someone that they know.

The Facebook owned image based social network will now be providing a simpler alert system for users.

The idea is to make it possible for the wearers of the smartwatch to use this Apple Watch app to keep up with what their closest friends are doing. It will let them know when a picture has been posted so that they can view it and respond as they’d like. This represents the first time that Instagram has ever made an entry into the world of wearable technology. Until now, it has kept itself well away from wearables, including the number of other smartwatches that are already on the market, and headsets such as Google Glass.

That said, due to the image based nature of Instagram, the Apple Watch app had to be created with care.

After all, the social network is meant for pictures and the Apple Watch has a tiny little screen. This caused the developers of the app to have to completely rethink the way that it would function. According to Ian Silber, a designer at Instagram, it was key for them to come up with “the simplest feed we could think of.” He also went on to add that “I think the watch is really about quick information and notifications. With the Watch, it’s about thinking about interactions in terms of seconds.”

Apple has established very solid rules with regards to the way that it will allow apps to be created for its smartwatch. For example, it has restricted the types of tools that third party developers can come up with through the use of its tools (the Watchkit). For example, the developers at Instagram attempted to transfer the double-tapping an image feature from its smartphone application in order to “like” that image through the Apple Watch app. However, that is not a feature that the Watchkit has to offer.