NEW YORK – Microsoft on Thursday announced the free availability on phones and tablets with a lighter version of its flagship products, the Office suite comprising word processing Word, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

The Office opening Ecosystem great rival Apple was one of the first major disruptions imposed by the new head of the US computer group, Satya Nadella: an Office application for the iPad tablet was launched in late March.

However, its use required to present payment of a subscription to Office 365, the cloud version of the online office suite.

The mobile application will now use Office for free, even if Microsoft points out in one of its official blogs that subscription to Office 365 will provide access to “editing capabilities and expanded collaboration unlimited storage OneDrive on, integration with (the online storage service competitor) Dropbox and a host of other benefits. ”

The subscription also remains necessary to use the Office software on a desktop computer.

In addition to the iPad app which, according to Microsoft, has already been downloaded over 40 million times, an adapted version of the Apple iPhone is launched on Thursday.

Microsoft also promises for next year another Office application for tablets from various manufacturers using the Android operating system from Google, and an optimized version of its next operating system Windows 10.

Microsoft claims more than one billion users worldwide for Office, which traditionally sold on physical media (disks and CD), but it strives more to offer in the form of online subscription (Office 365) because it represents a more regular source of income.