As a blogger who covers Microsoft,
I'll be the first to admit that I enjoy how open the company has become, and how early they are willing to show
products. This openness fosters goodwill and healthy conversations, which are obviously very good things. But the
downside of showing your stuff so early is that we all get excited to get our hands on it. Then we wait, and wait, and
wait.
Ed Bott, who has been writing books about Microsoft products seemingly forever, posted about the likely ship date for Office 2007 (previously known as Office 12), and for those of us waiting with bated breath, the news isn't good. He doesn't expect us to see Office 2007 until October, and he has quite a bit of experience trying to time book releases with product releases to back up his estimation.
While I hope Ed's wrong, in my heart of hearts I believe he's likely bang-on. I guess there's going to be a few more months of waiting before we can get our hands on this revolutionary version of Office.
1. All are set to present a clutch of new features, including a new user interface and XML-based file formats. The new Standard and Professional editions will come in at $399 and $499 respectively.
Posted at 8:18AM on Feb 25th 2006 by Designer