The retail release of Office 2007 will now be in early 2007 – and we have a modest proposal for how to announce these things.
Since Windows Vista will now arrive later than previously expected, Office 2007 is getting a similar push-back.
The retail release of Office 2007 will now be in early 2007 – that’s when the boxed retail product will be on the shelves. It’s possible the retail release of Office 2007 will be synced with Vista.
The ‘Release to Manufacturing’ date is now around October this year. That’s when license customers will be able to download their copies of Office 2007 for deployment in an organization.
Office 2007 is a major change for Microsoft and long-term Office users know that new technologies aren’t always a good thing at first. Adding new and substantially changed features to an already complicated product needs a lot of testing and tweaking – the more time to nail down bugs the better.
Office 2007 development could make use of the extra time. Not only are their new versions of all the Office products, there are massive changes to two major components that we all use.
There’s a fairly radical new interface and a new document format. We like the document format changes but am still wary of the user interface.
If the extra time is just a marketing strategy then it’s not good news. But if the time is used to listen to beta reports and (importantly) act upon those reports then it’ll be good news for Office 2007 purchasers.
You would not know all this from Microsoft’s official announcement. Instead of being up front about the change it’s put in breathtakingly roundabout manner as follows:
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Yesterday, Microsoft Corp. confirmed the timeline for release and availability of its 2007 Microsoft(r) Office system. The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006. Retail and OEM availability of the product are scheduled to coincide with the retail and OEM availability of the Windows Vista(tm) operating system in January 2007.
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Since a delay in software release, announced well ahead, is actually a good thing for customers why not say that? There’s really no need to be defensive about it … we have in mind something like this …
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Microsoft today announced that their Office 2007 developers will be given some extra time to make the product as stable and error free as they possibly can. This is possible after the announcement that the Windows Vista release date has also been pushed back.
” I’m not used to speaking plainly, it is not what I’ve trained for all my adult life, it’s very difficult for me”
said Chuck Cheeseburger, Group Product Manager of the Office Obfuscation Division
“But here goes … Microsoft Office 2007 will be released to manufacturing in October 2006 with retail product on store shelves in January 2007. We’ll make use of this extra time to work on this extremely complex software. “
Chuck then excused himself to take some medication and have a lie down – his analyst expects he’ll make a full recovery.
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We can dream …
Reports that Office 2007 is ‘late’ are overstating it. Any delay is a matter of weeks or a few months – nothing like the scale of delay we’re seeing in Windows Vista. And so what if there is a delay? – no customer is going to be deprived if another version of Office isn’t on their desk before the end of 2006.
