Attention grabbing headline, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s mere speculation triggered by some loose lips at the recent  Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Let’s look at a particular exchange between Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media and Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division.

TIM O’REILLY: No, I understand. I mean, we’re not using Office on our iPhones yet.

STEPHEN ELOP: Not yet, no, you’re not.

TIM O’REILLY: Oh, so is that something that we’re going to be doing?

STEPHEN ELOP: Just keep watching.

TIM O’REILLY: But still kind of coming back to this idea, certainly there are parts of your portfolio, SharePoint, for example, collaboration platform, Outlook clearly a collaboration platform, you know, one of the things that I’ve been asking the social network community for is to make sort of e-mail and the phone address book a really first-class citizen, and I’m wondering what your thinking is about how do we build really a personal information management console for the social network, and is that something that you have in your…

STEPHEN ELOP: So, speaking very broadly, let me make this point, and that is that Web 2.0, as we’ve come to think about it, is very much about the social interaction and everything that you can do amongst people and large groups of people, and it’s also a certain statement on architecture.

What is happening right now is those same principles of Web 2.0 that we’ve been seeing so publicly with Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, so many other examples out there, that’s now being translated, those lessons that have been learned are being brought into the enterprise, into a business setting. And as they come into the business setting, those same principles, combined with the corpus of information that’s inside an enterprise, which is your e-mail file, and not just the information but the social graph that comes with that, the business connections and so forth, the address book, all of that information out there on file shares, all of that is being brought into an environment that’s very much about the social-computing environment within an enterprise.

Did He Just Say Office 14 For The iPhone?

That was Stephen Elop demonstrating typical Microsoft caginess when probed about availability of Office 14 on the iPhone. Just keep watching.

And lessons have been learned and are being brought into the enterprise, into a business setting…. That’s it folks. Office 14 for iPhone is right around the corner!

Exclusive Photos Of Office 14 For The iPhone

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Tags | iphone, rumour, speculation