Is Xbox One finally getting Office 365?

November update may pave the way for more productivity in your living room

Microsoft is finally beginning to make the right noises about including the neglected Xbox One in its overriding "vision" for Windows 10, if a certain product manager is to be believed.

As we already know, Microsoft will indeed be running a single operating system on all its Windows devices - including phones, and Xbox One. A huge November update, which will revamp the UI - but more importantly, much of the backend of Xbox One - will hit very soon and, as Xbox group product manager Peter Orullian told Business Insider, "this means [Microsoft] now have one operating system on all Microsoft devices".

As well as adding backward compatibility for older Xbox 360 games and less reliance on Xbox One's doomed Kinect motion controller peripheral for navigation, what's perhaps more interesting about the expansion of Xbox One's potential is that the console will grow beyond its own black box.

The new Xbox One app, which will be downloadable from the Windows Store, now has functionality on PC, which includes recording and screenshotting from PC games for viewing on the Xbox One through the television, or remotely to Xbox Live contacts. Cortana - Windows 10's still rather privacy-baiting digital assistant - will also be appearing on Xbox One, with much of the learned behaviour and functionality associated with the user profile it works on.

The Windows Store itself, the company has promised, will also next begin merging apps across all formats, absorbing what is currently a games and television-watching app store on Xbox One with many of the offerings of the Windows Store. The inclusion of both first and third-party productivity apps shouldn't - if Microsoft has any sense when trying to boost popularity of its ailing store - be left out of such an equation.

Further into the future, Orullian swears, "everything will be unified at some point", which seems to be the best promise we can hope for at this stage. But it only takes the smallest of nips and tucks to expand OneDrive's existing Xbox One functionality beyond access to images to Word documents and Excel sheets. And with cross-platform connectivity now hotting up, a laptop or even a tablet could be used to input data to such files directly through the cloud, without having to plug in mice and keyboards, or any of the other awkward functionality issues that have plagued those attempting to use consoles like PCs since the days of the Sega Dreamcast.

Microsoft's still holding back on the Xbox pillar, but it feels time to start counting the months until it's allowed to join the wider Microsoft family.