When hedge fund
ValueAct announced it had taken a $2 billion stake in Microsoft earlier this week, questions arose about what changes the activist investor would try to make to improve the company’s value for shareholders.
ZDNet reports that ValueAct’s first declared goal for
Microsoft is to get it to release its
Office suite of enterprise software for rival mobile platforms iOS and Android. This is particularly important because a report from earlier this month indicated that
Microsoft wouldn’t have Office for iOS and Android ready until 2014 at the earliest. If ValueAct is using its newfound clout within the company to get Microsoft to focus its efforts more on developing Office for other platforms, then we could see Office release on iOS and Android sooner than we’d expected.
