Does anyone care about Office 14?

By Davey Winder
Tuesday, 13 January 2009 18:08

Development

Sorry to disappoint those fans of MS Office who were hoping to see an Office 14 release ahead of the official Windows 7 arrival. According to some leaked Microsoft slides, it looks like that is not going to happen. Not that anyone actually cares, do they?

The big news this last week or so has been the arrival of the Windows 7 Beta download and the subsequent problems people had in downloading it, there has been some other Microsoft software development news which has all but been lost in the Windows 7 hoo-hah.

I am talking about Office 14 of course, the software suite that has been the subject of much speculation with regards to the actual release date.

Would it arrive before Windows 7 officially hits the shops, or wouldn't it? That has been the question on the lips of those who care about such things. The answer, it appears, is no it will not arrive before Windows 7. Feel better now?

In fact, according to an official Microsoft software and services presentation slide that has leaked onto the web, Office 14 is not going to hit RTM status until 2010.

The slide shows a three pillar listing for the Office 14 value proposition, referring to these as Ubiquity and Specialization (Role-Based Productivity), Consumerisation and Governance, and finally Flexibility and Consolidation.

Amongst all this usual marketing puff, talking about the "anywhere availability for information and applications" and how the "new thumb generation comes to work with an expectation to use devices and services uncommon in today’s enterprise class systems" is the really important stuff: that 2010 date.

To be honest, I am not sure that this is any great problem. I doubt there would be many hands raised if I were to call on you so to do if you really needed an Office upgrade this year. Am I wrong? No, didn't think so.

In fact, I would rather Microsoft take its time and get us a product which is bug free (yeah right) and actually improves productivity right out of the box. I don't even care if you call it Office System 2009, or should that be 2010 now, to be frank.

Same goes for Windows 7. Does it really matter that the '7' label makes no sense? Does it matter if this will not appear until early 2010 instead of late 2009?