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If Microsoft started to develop apps and productivity Office software for the iPad, would that be a signal that Microsoft is willing to cannibalize some of its own product suite and go for the innovation? And even if it was, is Microsoft targeting the right innovation in order to disrupt its own sales for more profit?

I think they are having a forest for the trees moment here.

Microsoft will be bringing all of the software we know and love to the iPad, according to this TechCrunch report. Up till now, you have not been able to do much real office work on an iPad. It’s a consumption device, meant to trigger sharing of links, or the viewing of video when you are flying from point A to point B. It’s a handy e-book reader. It’s a lean back machine.  I see people using them on the subway all of the time. I’ve only seen one person using the iPad like a desktop. A flight attendant searching for flights to book last minute opened her iPad cover on the desk of a ticket agent at an airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, and revealed a spring-loaded keyboard, which she used to type in URLs.

And come to think of it, I talked to another guy on a flight from St. Louis to NYC, who said that he never bought an iPad because he could never find any ergonomically satisfying keyboards that would attach to it.

Therein lies the disruptive problem within the disruptive architecture of the iPad. I don’t think that adding a Microsoft Office Productivity suite to it will help, because the problem with the iPad and its gaps in consumption is not software, it’s hardware.

It’s a great machine, but people want it to do something it’s not doing, but they can’t get it to do that thing. They don’t like the keyboard on the touch screen, so they normally don’t use it for that. When they do use it, they have to put another keyboard attachment to it.

The Daily has a little more information on the move.

In addition to an iPad-ready version, a new edition of Office is expected for OS X Lion sometime next year. The current version of the desktop package, Office 2011, officially supports iOS versions up to Snow Leopard. A Lion version, likely available via the Mac App Store, is widely expected. Windows, too, is due for an update, with Office 2012 currently in beta form.

It’s assumed that both of these would work with Office 365 as well as mobile versions, such as Windows Phone’s Office Hub. Because it would be compatible with these full suites rather than as stand-alone apps, the pricing will most likely be significantly lower than existing Office products. In fact, it’s likely the cost will be around the $10 price point that Apple has established for its Pages, Numbers and Keynote products.

Microsoft already has numerous popular — and some not so popular — apps available for the iPad. They include Bing, MSN Onit and MSN OnPoint. There are even more available for iPhone, including Microsoft Tag, Windows Live Messenger and Wonderwall.

Re-Wired Group member Chris Spiek saw things a little differently than I did in a chat with him about it.

I think it’s an opportunity to provide a great solution. If they can ensure that .xlsx, .docx. and .pptx files open and display formatting correctly on the iPad, that will be huge for iPad users.

Right now, you can open those files in the Apple-equivalent programs on the iPad, but formatting is always terrible, so editing/enhancing is limited.

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I have put up a review of the Samsung Focus using Windows 7. I’m taking a stab at examining why I use certain types of smartphones, and why a phone that is new to me actually seems to get something done for me that an iPhone cannot.

If you would like to leave feedback, please do so. Here is a link to the review

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Earlier today Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta, Brian Tolle, and I recorded our first live radio show. The topic was Steve Jobs, and the profoundly gifted designers and engineers at Apple and how Jobs was able to create products that revolutionized how we use technology to complete jobs to be done in our lives.

The full broadcast is below, and please forgive us for some slight format errors in the beginning. It was our first show, and as we do more — and there will be many more — we will get better.

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Matthew Ingram at GigaOm has a great article about what he thinks Yahoo! should be doing. Namely, founder Jerry Yang could get behind his own private equity buyout of Yahoo!. The commentary in the comments section seems to lean on Yang’s need to bring a visionary onboard with a number 2 financial operative and kick some life into the company.

Or, Yang should jump ship, and set about becoming a mentor to entrepreneurs.

What’s your take? Here’s a carving out of some of Ingram’s pretty astute points:

But is there a case to be made for Yahoo remaining a standalone company? Possibly. Yangsays that he believes Yahoo is “the premier digital media company” — which seems like a bit of a stretch when you look at other potential bidders for that title, such as Apple and Amazon. But at least it’s a relatively straightforward and quantifiable goal, as opposed to some of the other ways in which Yahoo has defined itself over the years, which have been all over the map strategy-wise. What if Yang had the ability to focus more clearly on that goal and streamline the company to achieve it?

Wozniak says that consumers don’t want to know about the details of dual core processors and other geekhat mumbo-jumbo.  They just want to know what is it, and what does it do? Will it help me connect to the internet and get my email?

Here’s the video:

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Love, friendships, relationships, encounters. The human moments of discovery are the engines of product innovation. You don’t know what you want until you have it, and you can’t make something new until you have a human experience of discovery with something that either shows you what you lack, or presents you with something new you can build off.

You have to have that wow moment. The hyper focus on Apple these days shows us that fanatic followings result from people taking care to make things that humans really need.

Here’s a gem from Guy Kawasaki. On the weekend after Steve Jobs passed away, he lists some of the lessons he learned from the Apple founder.

He picks out consumers as being clueless. We say this all the time at The Re-Wired Group, only we think they are being asked the wrong questions, and being marketed to in ineffective ways. they are also being introduced to the wrong information, or they lack a real experience with the product being advertised.

This is why we say at the Re-Wired Group that, as consumers, advertising normally misses the point. It does not really offer an experience with a brand, because an experience with a brand is about touching, holding, using and “hiring” the product being branded.

Most branding seeks to give you a narrative about the product before you even have a chance to “hire” it, or to know what it really does for you.

It is fundamental: the use of a product is a social and emotional experience that cannot occur until the choice has actually been made.

Kawasaki shares the same sentiment, when he writes that customers rarely know what they want until they have it:

2. Customers cannot tell you what they need
“Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all that people said they wanted was a better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machine. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

He almost has it, but I would stress that a consumer really doesn’t know anything about the product until after he uses it. Steve Jobs used his own product. He demonstrated every iteration the teams came out with, publicly.

But it was not all Jobs. To keep building, and to build a new game, rather than a revision on sameness, Jobs had to have people better than himself, like the best designer in the world, Jonathan Ive. People like Ive are geniuses, but if you watch this video, you realize that it’s not all a gift that makes the ability to make a product people love possible. Ive had a personal experience with a Macintosh that showed him what he was missing, and set him on a career path that gave us the iPod, the iMac and dozens of other revolutionary products.