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Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Specialized Devices and Applications Group, told Fortune the company considers iPhone support to be very important.

"To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we're actually in the process of trying to understand that now," he said.

"The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We're still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It's just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we'll really get our head wrapped around that."

As well as Office, which has been successfully ported to mobile devices for many years, Microsoft is also planning voice recognition software for the iPhone and iPod touch, once it has evaluated whether it is possible within the limits of the SDK.