Microsoft Hits Back, Calls Apple Software Lightweight And Struggling

Boy, it did not take long for the Redmond Empire to strike back! The company has reacted pretty quickly to the comment Apple official made during the OS X Mavericks launch earlier this week.

Tim Cook, Apple CEO, had some choice words to say about Windows 8 during the event.

And Microsoft’s counterattack is filled with defense of its own products, along with criticism of some of the products that Apple has been promoting rather aggressively these past few months. Frank Shaw, the corporate vice president of Communications at Microsoft put up a lengthy blog post yesterday.

The post makes it a point to explain that the Surface tablet is really the number one device of its kind on the market when it comes to productivity. The gist of the matter is that Microsoft understands how people work, better than any other company in the world:

“Let’s be clear – helping folks kill time on a tablet is relatively easy. Give them books, music, videos and games, and they’ll figure out the rest. Pretty much all tablets do that. But helping people be productive on a tablet is a little trickier. It takes an understanding of how people actually work, how they get things done, and how to best support the way they do things already.”

Shifting attention to iWork, Shaw claims that Apple’s new strategy does not make much sense — for the sole reason that this particular suite of productivity applications has never got much traction:

“It was already priced like an afterthought, it’s hardly that surprising or significant a move. And it doesn’t change the fact that it’s much harder to get work done on a device that lacks precision input and a desktop for true side-by-side multitasking.”

Microsoft ends it up by calling Apple software struggling and lightweight, and labeling Apple’s recent efforts as mere attempts to play catch up.

So there you have it, folks — fire for fire, as scathing an attack as Apple’s. What are your thoughts?