The companyannounced its deal with Samsung earlier today to preinstall Office on select Android tablets from the South Korean technology giant. But the scale of this deal is actually much larger, as Redmond has penned similar deals with additional hardware partners across the globe.
Ten of them, in fact.
As detailed here, this new partnership will see each of these vendors preinstalling Office onto their Android powered hardware. Here’s the full list of companies:
- Casper (Turkey)
- Datamatic (Italy)
- Dell (US)
- DEXP (Russia)
- Hipstreet (Canada)
- JP Sa Couto (Portugal)
- Pegatron (Global)
- QMobile (Pakistan)
- Samsung (Global)
- Tecno (Africa)
- TrekStor (Germany)
Obviously, not all of these are worldwide leaders in terms of shipment of Android hardware, but many have their respective local markets cornered.
And under this new deal, all of these companies will preload apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype onto their Android devices — maybe not all tablets and smartphones, but a fair amount of them.
In fact, Samsung has confirmed that business consumers that buy their devices from its B2B channel will have access to three versions of Office 365, Business, Premium and Enterprise.
Part of Microsoft’s plan to move users and vendors away from Google branded apps and services, and give them a test of what to expect from the Windows ecosystem in terms of productivity.
