The future of Office and Windows

In an earlier post I hinted that Microsoft was developing an Office Suite for the internet and now it is time to get the inside scoop. You have come to the right place because we have all the low down on Office 13, Office 14, and Windows Vienna. eNews has the exclusive on the upcoming versions of the Office Suite and Windows Operating System. Microsoft released the coveted release date of Office 14 and a huge twist to the Web 2.0 Office 13. I would spill the beans now but you will have to click continue to get all the scoop.

ZDNet released a while back that Microsoft was planning on developing a Web 2.0 Office Application to compete with Google Docs & Spreadsheets. However, Microsoft has been keeping the next version of Office very closely held unlike they did with Vista and Office 2007. Thus we do not know if it will be a web application or hard drive based or both. What eNews does know is that Microsoft will be skipping Office 13 because of its superstitious meaning. Like many 13's before it Microsoft does not want to have to say "Houston we have a problem." Instead Microsoft will be calling the next version of its office suite Office 14 (This is only the Microsoft internal codename not the final name).

In a Denmark press conference Microsoft released the schedule for Office 14. Office 14 started development in 2006 and will be releasing the Office 14 beta 1 in the first half of 2008 and the second beta in the second half of 2008. Microsoft plans on releasing Office 14 in the first half of 2009. Of course knowing everything technology I would guess that Office 14 which of course will most likely be changed to Office 2009 will be released in November, 2009. Microsoft also released that it will be spending a whopping $930 million per year on research and development which is 20% more than Office 2007.

Even though Office 14 is still in the planning stages Microsoft already knows what they want to focus on to improve on the Office 2007.

Individual Impact: Continued focus on individual productivity and effectiveness.
Communication and Collaboration: To enable better communication and more efficient information-sharing to keep communities, co-workers, partners, and customers in sync.
Enterprise Content Management: To author, manage, and organize complex documents and content.
Business Process and Business Intelligence: To make the right information available throughout the business process.
Office Business Platform: To make it simple to build client and web-based business applications.
Manageability and Security: To make it easy to securely deploy and manage around the globe.


Windows Vienna
There is not really much to say about Windows Vienna. Much like Office 14 Microsoft is keeping everyone a closely guarded secret. eNews can tell you though that Windows Vienna will be changing codenames for the third time. Windows Vienna was originally announced in 2000 as Blackcomb as a follow up to Windows XP. However after many delays it was eventually renamed to Vienna and Vista was announced to be the XP follow up. On February 15 Microsoft announced that Vienna will once again be changing names to simply Windows 7. Some people believe this is because it will be built on the NT 7.0 core while Windows Vista and XP were built on NT 6.0. Another thing we can announce is that Windows 7 will be released sometime in 2009 but most likely around the time of Office 14.

I know this was a lot to take in but this has been your daily dose of eNews