Microsoft is looking for a handout.

Microsoft told AllThingsD this week thatthe company has insisted that Apple lower its 30 percent cut for Office 365 subscriptions sold through Microsoft Office for iOS.

Microsoft probably assumes that since they have such an iron grip on the office suite market — in most industries, you’re essentially required to use office, or at least share Office-compatible files — that they’re “special,” and deserve a better deal than tiny software and app companies that aren’t massively profitable corporations.

I think that not only should Apple stick to its current position of saying no to this request, they should go further. Much further. They should try to replace Microsoft Office as the de facto standard for Office software with iWork — to kill Office as the global standard.

The late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs used to talk a lot about “changing the world.” And he did. But what has Apple done for the world lately?

I’ve got a great new way for Apple to truly make the world a truly better place: Kill Microsoft Office.

First I’m going to tell you why Microsoft Office deserves to die. Then I’m going to tell you how Apple could do it. 

Why Office Must Die

No, I don’t mean Office itself should become unavailable. I’m sure there are many companies that truly benefit from its mind-boggling feature set and programmability.

The problem with Office is that it became a locked-in standard during the more-is-always-better era of the mid-1990s. In order to keep their cash cow kicking, Microsoft has added more and more and more features and functions into the already bloated and unwieldy software suite.

Now, everyone from small businesspeople to secretaries to technology columnists who have been using Office since 1992 but who now find it unusably complex are pretty much required to use it.

In my own case, most of the publishing companies I write for require me to submit articles in Word format. Because Pages doesn’t create a universally compatible version of Word documents, I have to actually buy and use Word just to convert from Pages to Word format every single time I submit a column to these publishing companies.

When I do actually use Office for anything other than format conversion, I spend most of my mental energy fighting the software for control. Microsoft’s shell games with its features — “I’ll bet you’ll never find it now!!” — its auto-formatting options that keep coming back like zombies after you turn them off, the urgent security updates that always happen right when I’ve got to use the product urgently — these and other annoyances mean you can never just use the product; you have to wrestle with it.

The bigger problem is that Microsoft Office invites the wrong kind of communication. Office makes it way too easy — almost mandatory — to create complex, incredibly ugly and horribly formatted documents.

How many irritating Word documents have you encountered in your career? How many crappy, overly creative spreadsheet graphs? How many soul-killing PowerPoint presentations?

OK, how many beautifully formatted, elegantly simple Office documents have you encountered. Zero?

To what extent is Microsoft’s overpowering bias for ugliness and cheesiness asserted for the benefit of the user, and to what extent for Microsoft to have some reason to get you to pay for the newest version?

And boy, do you pay.

The lowest price on Microsoft’s web site for Microsoft Office 2010 is $119 for a single-user, single-PC student or home version. Wow!

If you want, you can scale that all the way up to $499 for the single-user, two PC version of Office Professional. If you have three PCs, you’ll have to pay more than $499.

Beyond the devastating cost for this suite, I suspect that the collective time and energy wasted by a world struggling to use Microsoft Office removes billions of dollars from the global economy annually as well.

How to Kill Microsoft Office

It’s hard to imagine anything more obvious than the idea that Apple’s iWork suite is vastly superior for the majority of humans on this planet than Microsoft Office.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers are incredibly easy to use. They look better on screen and produce far simpler, more tasteful-looking documents.

And the desktop applications cost $20 each — take your pick. No shell games. No confusing price structure.

The way Apple could kill Microsoft Office is to make a version of iWork for Windows, then launch a massive advertising campaign for all versions: Windows, OS X and iOS.

They could also promote iWork apps for iOS to their millions of corporate customers, then leverage that access into upgrading to iWork on corporate Windows desktops.

In short, Apple should launch a full-scale effort to replace Office as the office standard.

A Word for You Critics

I know, I know. I’m going to hear it from a small army of corporate-savvy IT types: You can’t replace Office; it’s too integrated into the in-house applications and workflow. iWork is just a toy, a plaything — not a real Office Suite. iWork is not secure. Etc.

You know what? That’s the same argument those same kinds of people said about why businesses can’t use iPhones. But now businesses are usingiPhones (and iPads) in huge numbers. And they’re better off for it.

The “consumerization of IT” shouldn’t just involve hardware. It should involve software, too. Especially office suite software.

Every new generation of computing has become simpler and easier to use. And every generation of IT priesthood has fought hard to maintain a more bloated, expensive and complex system only they can understand or control.

Besides, Steve Jobs used Keynote software to present in his product announcements. Can you name a more effective presentation someone else delivered using PowerPoint?

Apple uses iWork internally. Can you name a more profitable or successful company using Office?

The bottom line is that office suites exist so that people can communicate with other people. They shouldn’t get in the way, or confuse, or uglify, or make expensive that communication.

Nearly all office suite usage in the world involves some very simple act. Somebody wants to write a note and print it. A sales guy wants to present some key points to a prospective client. That sort of thing.

And most of it should be done with a simple, clean, pretty, inexpensive and stable tool like iWork, not a complex, messy, ugly, costly and problematic tool like Office.

At this point, only Apple is in the position to save the world from Microsoft Office.

Apple has made Windows software before, too. They created iTunes for Windows. And they make Safari for Windows.

But what we really need is iWork for Windows. Apple needs to change the world by changing the world’s default office suite.

Maybe getting rid of apples iron grip on software distribution on certain platforms would be more beneficial? It might be worth rivals developing competitive alternatives to Office then and stimulate more competition.

A 30% cut is bigger than any other platform holder I can think of.

I'm getting tired of Apple!! Seriously, people make Apple seem much more important and bigger than they actually are. The only reason they make such gigantic profits is because the cost of producing their products is less than a eigth of what they are sold for!! And for some reason, all their fanboys just have to buy the latest iphone or ipad every year. 

I hardly think apple is in a position to challenge microsoft on the office front.

They brought touch screen fad to the mobile market. and that have made them how profitable and powerful they are today ....Now Microsoft have bring the touch screen to Win OS .. if the fad of touch screen in desktop market increases... imagine how profitable and powerful Microsoft will be.. Windows sell more licences than iOS in a year... Apple should be thinking about how to defend their turf...they are feeling the heat both from Android and microsoft.

i'm sorry, but MS office is amazing. i've tired out other programs and nothing comes close.

What a load of bollocks, Office is there to stay, because guess what, businesses, small businesses and users like it, a lot.

All these idiots that think or want Microsoft or it's products to go away are getting tiring, the world uses an unimaginable amount of protocols & software that comes out of Redmond.

Realistically, the only threats to Office are Google Docs and open source software; and both of those threats are many years away from seriously impacting Office.

The gap between office and the open source office suites gets a little smaller each year, and they're adequate tools for the bulk of people who only scratch the surface of what Office offers, but they're still a long ways away from matching office. Google Docs is a threat because it seems to represent a solution to a common problem that Microsoft has not produced a good solution for, document sharing and collaboration; the lack of certain features can easily be ignored because it offers other features. Even with Google docs, while its features are acceptable for the bulk of users who only scratch the surface of what Office can do, it will be years before it can match the functionality of Office.

For Apple to try and replace Office on their own they are (likely) going to take 5 years to produce a product that is 10 years behind what Microsoft is offering.

Microsoft office is great (Love that excel) and I can't see anything dethroning such a good quality program.

Excel is a wonderful program. I have to analysis data all the time and excel is a great tool to do it.

Sometimes I have to use programs like Statistica to analyse more complex data. The interface is so bad and difficult compared with excel. I use excel to format the data and I just paste it in other programs. Long story short, I couldn't do it without excel.

PowerPoint gives you a lot of freedom. You can make the best Presentations on it. I've even made Posters for several Congress Presentstions with it.

And Word... No program comes close to it in terms of quality.

I have all the other office programs, but I dom't care for them.

I think Apple should die in order to change the world, into a better place.