RSSConfirmed: Office 14 delayed until 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published February 24, 2009, 3:14 PM
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that CEO Steve Ballmer did indeed make a "passing remark" during his appearance at an analysts' conference in New York this morning, associating Office 14 -- the company's principal applications suite -- with next year as a release timeframe rather than this year; and that Ballmer's comment was accurate.
The text of Ballmer's comment was first reported by PC Magazine's Mark Hachman, who quoted the CEO as saying, "The next big innovation milestone is Office 14, our next Office release, which will not be this year."
Microsoft's spokesperson told Betanews this afternoon, "We can confirm, as Steve Ballmer shared this morning during his meeting with financial analysts, that the next version of Office will be generally available next year."
Last summer, other spokespersons tipped off journalists, in what appeared to have been a "prepared leak," that Office 14 would be generally available in 2009, most likely during the first half of this year. The delay -- perhaps as much as 12 months, maybe longer -- will mean drastic revisions in the production schedules of supporting third-party software makers, publishers, and training specialists.
"How long have we been hearing cloud computing?"
Hmmmmm. In the last year - as SaaS has been a tepid market and virtualization has increased - and now others want to capture your business even as hardware and admin costs are being significantly reduced through increased backend server and desktop virtualization.
And unfortunately for all of this marketing hype, VMWare is right in suggesting what they are dubiously calling a private cloud - your own managed virtualized backend and desktop environment where you retain control while reducing overhead hardware and maintenence costs while increasing your disaster recovery capabilities and institute best practice security measures.
But then, common sense is a rare commodity in IT where marketing brochures, amorphous catch phrases and 2 page articles on in-flight magazines that tout magical turnkey plans for data center redesign that manage themselves and can be completed in a weekend.
Oh, and just how much of your sensitive proprietary data should you outsource to other's care? And just what are the exposure issues related to that? Hmmmm?
Funny, we have heard almost NO talk of that! And THAT should be the FIRST issue addressed before any of the other subsequent outsourced scenarios are even mentioned!
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|Some words to remember. Sharepoint, offline and online collaboration integration. Microsoft is years ahead on these things. Every reason you don't understand on why someone would want to upgrade is related to these additional functions. How long have we been hearing cloud computing? Office 2007 has this functionality now but they'll be greatly enhanced in each future versions.
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|Oh no!
What will we do?
You think Vista was a bomb. I have a feeling that few will have a compelling reason to move to Office 14.
As far as a revenue source, this will hurt MS.
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|We use Office XP with Outlook 2003/Visio 2003 also. Works very well for us. We also have open office on each machine, and it is used to open word documents that Microsoft Office cannot. It's always quite amusing to do that.
Might consider upgrading to Office 2003 Suite, if the price was $40/seat. Otherwise, why bother?
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|Yea, no one cares. Fact is, even in a strictly business setting, 90% of Office users would be fine with Office 97.
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|(yawn) perhaps a comparison of the percentages of Office iterations in use would be helpful for the uninitiated.
I'm betting that Office 2007 still has not supplanted Office 2003 as most used. You would think MS would get over the greed, and simply do fixes for current products, perhaps adding important changes rarely in the form of additional packages (like a Plus Pack)
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|In MSFT's defense, they are a for-profit business: they never really "get over" the need for revenue. However, I do agree that the majority of users do just fine with Office 2003. Sure, it had its little quirks and niggling bugs like every version before it (and yet to come), but it was feature-rich and overall fairly solid. I dislike Office 2007's UI and the removal of many features I found essential.
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|I agree that Office 2003 has not supplanted Office 2007. I know of a lot of people who are doing everything they can to avoid Office 2007.
I hope Office 14 has a lighter footprint than 2007. At times Office 2007 feels like the Vista of office suites. It is slow to launch. Macros run slower. The ribbon is fine once one gets used to it.
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|Outlook 2007 is infinitely better than any previous version of Outlook. As for the latest versions of Word and Excel, there really isn't much of a difference from the 2003 versions.
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|You hit it on the nail,in that they are indeed trying to make it fleet of foot,to match Win7.And they seem,by the delay,having difficulty resolving this.
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