Nearly three years ago, Ars Technica had the nerve to suggest that the iPad could work as a legitimate, if not ideal, replacement for a workday laptop. The conclusion that Jacqui Cheng reached in her 2011 test was that if you used nothing more than an iPad all year, you could get quite a bit of work done, but boy, it would have been nice to have a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office handy.

At the time, I certainly agreed. I was a few months into a new freelance writing gig covering tech for the short-lived, tablet-only magazine The Daily, and I decided to immerse myself in the gig by going iPad-only, at least during the workday.

The gadget decision made a weird sense. I was short on cash, carless, and riding my bicycle to coffee shops to do my work. I’d already blown my high-tech budget on an iPad just so I could read the magazine I was working for, and my other portable option was an old, heavy Dell laptop. The lighter, more mobile option worked, especially once I found a comfortable Bluetooth keyboard—one of Microsoft’s products, which worked great for my stubby fingers.

This setup lasted me two solid years, during which I yelled at my iPad on more than one occasion for its productivity failings: awkward app-swaps to load IMs, wonky spreadsheet loads in Apple’s Numbers app, and more. I begged my editors not to put important notes in a text document’s comments, which Pages couldn’t load, at least for a while.

Few of those issues were Microsoft’s fault, but Office could have swooped in and become my mobile-productivity hero; in fact, more than two years ago, my colleagues at The Daily reported that such a thing was bound to happen any minute. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen until this morning, when Microsoft finally unveiled Office for iPad, a suite of tablet-ready apps that fully unlock with an Office 365 subscription.

That’s great news for Office addicts, but Microsoft left a lot of users high and dry over those years, desperate for a fix. In my situation, I was operating under a handicap. No matter how much work Apple did to beef up its iOS productivity suite, I still needed to find a way to achieve feature parity with any editors and other colleagues I was communicating with.

Today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a big stir about “empowering people to do more across all devices,” but the point he missed—the reason I already kissed Microsoft Office goodbye in terms of day-to-day productivity—is that I don’t just work across multiple devices. I work across multiple people.

Google Drive on iOS wasn’t the cleanest experience at first blush. Most painfully for me, it lagged when registering my keyboard’s strokes, which wasn’t going to cut it. Eventually, that issue evaporated, and I began living in the cloud. I didn’t even need to switch apps to alert collaborators about changes or updates I had made, and I never worried about how a document looked on my screen compared to someone else’s. I could live in the Google Drive app. I could focus on the task at hand.

I imagine the average Microsoft Office user doesn’t play much with the suite’s higher-level formatting features, but even if they do, those features pale in comparison to the collaborative tools that Google Drive enables. And if I’m pulling the iPad out during a flight or between lunches at a conference, my formatting capabilities simply aren't in as high demand as my time.

As of today, Office 365 subscribers on iPad will finally be able to work collaboratively within the Microsoft Office suite. The problem is that most tablet users needed that ability yesterday, or last month, or last year.

Poor freelancers who might consider buying a single subscription (and lug an iPad between coffee shops on a bike) aren’t going to drive Microsoft’s bottom line. But in the case of small businesses that have already taken the Google Drive plunge, what’s going to convince them to reverse course and sign up for dozens of Office 365 subscriptions? Prettier drag-and-drop image abilities on iPad?

Today’s launch is better late than never, but more importantly, it’s proof that the top brass at Microsoft has stopped being so hung up on what device Office runs on. That fact should embolden Office fans hoping for frequent, perpetual product support no matter where they decide to run Excel, and that’s going to be Microsoft’s big selling point from here on out.

But Microsoft wasn't first, not by a longshot, and I wrote this story in Google Drive for a reason. I had to get my work done, and I couldn't wait.