Microsoft is going in a new direction, leaving the "Windows first" motto behind and replacing it with "cloud/mobile first." The most important upshot of this change in priorities is that as of Thursday, March 27, Microsoft Office is finally here (for real) for the Apple iPad.

Microsoft's Shift

Microsoft's holding back a native iPad version of Microsoft Office has been a real annoyance for users of the popular Apple tablet for years now. It was clear in previous years that Microsoft wanted to keep its ubiquitous productivity suite off the most popular tablet in the world in order to boost rocky sales of its Surface line, and other Windows-based tablets.

Even when Microsoft brought Office Mobile for Office 360 subscribers to iOS, the company chose to make it only native to iPhone and iPod touch-sized screens, meaning that if you tried to use it on your iPad, you'd have a glitchy, blurry time of it.

But with competition for cloud-based mobile office software suites -- like Google's MS Office-compatible software Quickoffice, which the Mountain View company made free late last year -- on its heels, and Microsoft's new CEO looking for ways to rejuvenate the company, Microsoft has done an about face on keeping Office off iPads. Along with it, Microsoft is emphasizing its cloud services in enabling cross-device productivity.

"We live in a world where device types, shapes, sizes and form factors are exploding and will continue to do so.... But just because human activity will continue to be multidevice doesn't mean we must tolerate islands of isolated capability," waxed Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella in a blog post on Thursday. "Instead, device diversification dramatically increases the importance of creating a more seamless experience. And the way we get there is through the cloud."

Office for iPad, Tied to the Cloud

You can download Office for iPad (which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) for free at the app store today. But with Microsoft's new emphasis on cloud services, in order to actually use Office to edit documents, you have to have an Office 365 subscription, which uses OneDrive or SharePoint for storing live edits and real-time collaborative document work with multiple users at once.

Office for iPad carries with it a lot of same abilities and layout as Office Mobile for iPhone and Android, but with the advantage of a large screen. But, instead of simply being a larger version of the Office Mobile app for iPhone, Microsoft said it rebuilt Office from scratch to be touch-centric and iPad-friendly.

With its new emphasis on cloud services and cross-platform use, Microsoft offers an option to use Office apps across Mac and Windows tablets and computers with the Office 365 subscription. Getting an Office 365 subscription (which has a free 30-day trial) costs at minimum $10 per month or $100 for a year, but it will allow you to use mobile Office apps on up to 5 tablets, now including the iPad, as well as up to 5 Windows PCs or Mac computers.

It's clear where Nadella is looking to take Microsoft, and it's out of the decades-old platform wars and into the cloud. Whether that helps transform the company remains to be seen, but mirroring what late Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when making the first crack in the Microsoft/Apple platform war (allowing iTunes and thus the iPod available on Windows) more than a decade ago, "hell froze over."