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Office 2007 Delayed Again
Tyler Too writes "Ars Technica reports that Microsoft Office 2007 has been delayed again, this time into early 2007. 'Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007.' Tough bit of timing after this week's online preview of Office 2007."
Maybe it should be called Office 2008?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Are we no longer going to be offered software that is "Product 20xx" before the year 20xx actually happens?!?!
I'm still using Office '97!
So what exactly are the improvements over the last ten years.
Who cares? I mean what features could they add? I'd be excited if Office 2007 was a strip down. Obviously, it is going to be bloated with useless junk. By the way, Word 5 for the Mac was the best product Microsoft ever built.
Dang, they're going to miss the 2006 holiday season. Now what should I ask for for Christmas???
microsoft is just digging thier hole deeper and deeper. of course, the incentive to upgrade to office is typically called into question with each iteration; but after the vista delay media frenzy, this is probably not exactly what microsoft wanted.
Anything else, and we mean anything else is someone's speculation. There is no date. We don't know any date. If you have a friend who claims they have "inside info", or there's some office suite news site, or some computer store at the mall who claims they know - they do not. They are making it up. There is no date. Period.
And yes, we know the office suite has taken a long time. There's no possible joke you could make about the office suite's development time that we haven't already heard. :)
Except the one about us having bought out 3D Realms to redo the UI in Aero so it'll look cool under Vista, which is why their other project's a bit late, too.
The postponement notice came within a week of the Vista bombshell about a month ago. It doesn't make a lot of sense to start marketing the new Office before Vista comes out.
it won't come much later than Vista.
*evil grin*
Open Office 2.0.3 was released today for the low low cost of NOTHING :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/Imagine that. But maybe MS needs to hedge their bets in the future, like Windows Whenever or Windows WTF.
So which part of this writeup did Ars Technica plagiarize from someone else?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I tried the beta this week. I went in with an open mind, actually I was quite eager to try the 'ribbon' thingy. My hopes where dashed by the shameful M$ data mining effort before accesing the demo.
I don't like it. Maybe is the learning curve, but doing basic stuff in Word (changing font size, for instance) was troublesome. The terminal environment didn't work either. And Outlook? Piece of crap. I for one will stay on my current version of OpenOffice, thank you.
the future is but past forgotten
... if this could be related to re-thinking that radical user-interface change that they've attached to Word. (I use a CAD program that adopted this kind of thing a few releases back and I still detest this, just like anyone with tendonitis would detest pointless extra mouse clicks.)
Beta preview is right the time that all their big corporate accounts would feedback "for the love of God, we're not retraining every person in the darn organization just to use Word. Now CHANGE IT BACK!"
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Don't you hate it when companies ship product X with "year" as the version-number or title actually in "year - 1"?
;-)
Just like you can't really buy sandals in summer because the silly shoe-shops have already stocked the autumn-ware?
MSFT is responding to consumers and posponing the release of Office2007 until it matches the year it is shipped in.
As Windows Vista bears no release-date name, its release-date is bit arbitrary...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
You'll notice that they CARE about the people who use their product. People might give Office crap about how they keep pushing products back, but they only do it so you get the best product. Do you complain when Blizzard does it? :-P. It's worth it to wait.
You do?
Well, you shouldn't
work....
I very much enjoy using the ribbon. I think its a huge improvement in usability. If I wasn't using it in Parallels mostly and there was a Mac version, I'd use it definitely. I always liked Entourage, but I won't use it due to Rosetta (I only use PPC apps when I have no choice - with email I have a choice).
So while I love Outlook 2007 and Word 2007, I don't enjoy the speed. Its definitely slower. So I hope they work on that more.
Office 97 was a piece of junk, and 2000 didn't offer much more. 2002 was where they started getting things right, and 2003 had some nice features. I've personally been using the 2007 beta where there's some nifty stuff that I could see some business use for (though they're pushing Sharepoint like a crack dealer).
So, IMO, if you don't have documents that are very heavily formatted (which judging by the fact that you're still using 97, I don't think so), and money is an issue, move yourself out of MS 97 and go with OO.O 2.
Prove it.
OpenOffice 2.0.3 got released today. :)
It is multi-platform, open source and free.
It supports the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard which is an ISO standard.
It is compatible with Microsoft Office.
http://www.openoffice.org/
They discovered Open Office could still read the new file format. Decided to tweak it that little bit further.
Deleted
Parallels? Entourage? Rosetta?
Maybe it's a Mac thing, but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Care to elaborate?
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
The problem is that Office 2007 and the ribbon punishes power users.
... a lot ... in Office 2003 an option appeared to select MDI or SDI. Maybe in Office 2010 we'll get an option to get our menubar back.
If you know what you are doing under Office 95+, you can throw all your acquired knowledge out the window (not quite but close). Really what happens is that you know what you want to do, but are no longer able to actually do it. Now you have to figure out how to do what you want under some new system.
Now this isn't as bad as being an Office power user and moving to OpenOffice, where you know what you want it just isn't how OpenOffice works. Office 2007 stills works the way you think, under the hood. However, you can't open the hood and do what you want. It is like trying to drive your car using an RC car remote control. You know what you want, you just aren't allowed to touch the steering wheel or the pedals.
The other problem with the ribbon is the mouse-only nature of it. Forget mouse-centric computing, this is mouse only computing. It was bad enough that Office would change the Alt-mnemonics every release, but now they are bye-bye.
Really this is a UI change on a mature product with no real purpose but change for change sake, and assuming all users are morons. If you hit the space bar 20 times for each line to move something to the right (as opposed to setting a tab stop for those lines) this UI change is for you.
If we are lucky this will be like the MDI/SDI UI change in Office 2000 (?). Users complained
Typical, marketing attitude of computer users are idiots, there are no power users. When actually users tend to know more then the condescending marketing people think.
BTW, I know someone who worked marketing at my company and left for MSFT. She used to fake user surveys to reach the outcome she wanted. I have never trusted marketing surveys since then.
Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank.
Not only have they locked in the vast majority of enterprise customers, they now have no pressure to deliver a product when they said they would.
This is classic Microsoft and their best.
I mean, really! 99% of the users wouldn't use anything that isn't in Office 2000. The only reason would be for file formats (more MS proprietary, as well and XML and OD), but still 99% of the users still wouldn't ever NEED to use them. I think a new Office version is a dead horse. Somebody shoot Steve B. and Bill G.!
OpenOffice FTW! 2x Fits my needs perfect. Been using it since 1.3 and loving it!
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
>The release date of this office suite is "When it's done".
The problem with this is that "When it's done" will still include a truly awsome number of bugs.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I first got to know OpenOffice in a very awkward place at a very awkward time: specifically, in the Akihabara district of Tokyo at about 3:30 am. I had just finished a ridiculously long "meeting" which basically consisted of karaoke, drinking, and listening to The Greatest Hits Of The 80's volumes 1–9. Needless to say, we didn't accomplish much during normal hours that night! :-)
Anyway, it's 3:30 am. I'm stuck in Akihabara because I don't have an International Driver's License (let alone a car) and have to find a cheap place to crash for a few hours before the JR starts its morning run. I managed to find a 24-hour cybercafe open, so I went in, paid my ¥800 and found a quiet booth to stay in. As soon as I turn on the computer to check my e-mail, I see icons for both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on the desktop. I figure, hey, maybe I can get some work done, and fire up OpenOffice.
And that's when the trouble starts.
I first tried to open up a Japanese text file (saved in Shift_JIS format). Simple task, right? WRONG! OpenOffice insists the file is in UTF-8 format. I try to override it by looking for a converter, but alas, I can only work in Unicode. Apparently Shift_JIS isn't good enough to be supported in OpenOffice. I open up the text file in Microsoft Word and it looks fine. I figure it's some sort of one-time bug, so I save the text file (making sure it's in Unicode) and close Word. I try (keyword: try) to open the file in OpenOffice, and...
I wait. And wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. I'm guessing Java isn't too good with rendering Kanji at a rate faster that 5 characters per second. I'm almost reminded of an old Telnet session made over a modem. But at least it rendered characters correctly!
After about an hour of trying to get this God-awful mess of an office suite to open and display a single text file, I give up. I close down OpenOffice and go back to trusty Microsoft Word. Later that day, over a bottle of C.C. Lemon and some habanero chips, I'm reminded why there are product delays: It's because they'd rather hammer out the bugs themselves than subject their paying customers to a shitty product. Go figure.
Long story short: If any employees suggest OpenOffice, or indeed any "quality" open-source program, I'm throwing them out on their ass. And they're not getting severance pay. And I'm filing it as them quitting so they don't get any unemployment checks. Morons don't deserve to be paid.
"THIS IS TRUE LUNACY!"
I don't know if I can wait that long! My spreadsheets and word documents just aren't living up to their full potentiall!
/sarcasm
I will forever be a student.
Sounds like there's some tight coupling with the next version of the rewritten-from-the-ground-up operating system having the best security of any OS on the market. Maybe they should stop charging extra for this and ship it with the computer and tie the pricing to the hardware so that you can't update the computer without asking permission.
or are they just having a difficult time figuring out how to read the ODF specs?
is there a train wreck coming or what.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
... rapid development? Oh wait, Bill told them to do rabid development.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The parent poster would probably change his mind if he were to watch any of the presentations made by Jensen Harris, the man in charge of the new Office UI.
I am a Windows 2000/Office 97 user who does not upgrade just because Microsoft decides they need to make a few extra billions with a bump in version number and some new eye candy. I assumed (without any evidence) that the new Office would be more of the same. But then I found Jensen Harris' presentation at BayCHI last December to be so interesting that now I am excited about trying the new Office UI.
Essentially, the new UI gets rid of the menu bars, button bars, side panels, clippy agents, personal menus and other cruft that slowly accumulated over the successive revisions of Microsoft Office. His argument is that a complex product needs a clear interface. And that's what the ribbon is: Everything is there, and its choices are always context sensitive.
My own personal opinion is that the new interface is pure brilliance, and it won't be long before other companies start poorly(*) imitating its task-based approach over the traditional feature-based approach.
Download the BayCHI slides and video. If you develop software, the new UI is definitely something to behold.
===
(*) The imitations will be done poorly because most other software firms do not have the huge sample of user reports automatically created in the current version of Office. The Office UI team was able to determine the frequency of commands so that even their arrangement on the ribbon will be from most-used to least.
The beta version only installs on Windows XP.
Now armed with this knowledge, people running older versions of Windows can save their bandwidth for other things.
I'm sure that once the product is out of beta, the suite will definitely run faster.
...was this lousy video demo.
I even went through all the info-gathering rubbish first, and downloaded their ActiveX control. And then when I actually tried to start the interactive "test drive" thing, I got an error message popping up (apparently within their application) saying it had gone wrong, and a blank screen. I hope that's not the demo of what Office 2007 is actually going to do! :-/
I did watch the streaming video demo of the new UI though, and I have to say that it pretty much plays out my worst fears since the first previews appeared. A lot of the stuff they pitch as being "great" and "amazing" and "beautiful" doesn't look all that hot to me.
For a start, there is going to be a significant amount of retraining required for the UI. Things have moved, big time, and by the looks of it we're stuck with context-sensitive everything. (I'm guessing I'm not the only Office user here who disables the "smart" menus that hide items as one of the first things they do on a new install?) Just having a significantly rearranged UI is going to put a lot of people off, regardless of any merit the actual layout has.
But what's worse is all the missed opportunities. Everything and its brother now comes with "live updates", e.g., as you move your mouse over the font combo box, the document text in the background switches to the font you select in "real time". Sounds handy, but I can see it getting old real quick, given the lag time for the visual updates evident in the demo.
There are also loads of "galleries", where you can select a particular setting for everything from table formats to the position of an imported picture on the page, based on effectively a pane of thumbnail previews of the options. The thing is, Word's default templates have always sucked big time from a design and typography perspective, and all the examples they used in the video demo were a million times worse. Do I really want a lime green, 3D-shaded border around my text box, if I'm producing a document for print? Probably not. I won't even mention the Powerpoint demo, where our host takes a perfectly readable six-item bullet list, and with a wave of his magic mouse turns the list into several different graphics... all of which were completely unreadable by comparison (but the colours were pretty). Oh, sorry, I did mention it. Never mind.
What was conspicuously missing from the video was any information about how customisable this all is (or isn't). While the example footer style they add with "just one click" isn't offensive in isolation, it's completely unrelated to the rest of the document formatting, and unlikely to be much use to anyone as it stands. There's no concept mentioned of an overall document template with consistent styles across all these different settings. And all of the demonstrations about text formatting still focus on manually clicking random formatting icons, just like people do with a toolbar now. You'd think they could take the opportunity to catch up with the semantics-based formatting that everything from LaTeX to HTML has been working towards for decades.
There are a load of minor things as well, but personally as a "power user", I found pretty much all of their "improvements" sounded like things that were more limited and awkward to work with than the status quo. Of course you have to use something for real for a while to be sure how much things will really help or get in the way, but after a couple of decades, I'm a pretty reliable judge ahead of time, and things are not looking good.
Bottom line: it's not a good demo video if they want people like me to buy their product. If they were willing to bite the bullet and go for a radical UI change, they could have made a lot of the features so much better, but from the video, it looks like all we've got is yet another facelift on the same tired old feature set and underlying models. Let's hope that's just bad advertising, and not how things turn out in the finished product...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you don't have anything original to say, then don't say anything at all.
I was quite impressed with the Office 2007 beta and was surpised to learn that performance was an issue. One of the features I really like is the ability to do real-time previews of different style sets, which performed quickly. The UI is also quite streamlined and its obvious Microsoft is trying something new with UI design that no other OS can attest to.
I just am amazed that when there is an article that talks about how slow Microsoft's product development is taking, people complain about how long it is taking. But when Microsoft was turning out Office and OS updates with only a year or two between them, people were complaining about how fast an unecesary it was for MS to come out with something new so quickly.
The bottom line is, people don't got anything new, or original to say about Microsoft, and it gets pretty tired. I don't know if people think they are being witty or smart when they post another "insert common misperception here" comment.
The saddest part is, how may people are using MS products every day. I mean 90% of the desktop market uses Windows, so you kind of have to wonder if Slashdot is only read and commented on by 10% of the computer market.
Though not a inveterate critic of Microsoft, I have remarked that they are best at canabalizing others' ideas rather than innovating. I was excited about the ribbon first because it does seem to be a cool alternative to menus but also because it represented something they believed in that wasn't just ripped off of Macs or a small startup developer. But it is so fat. I live on my laptop and smaller UI is better! I meticulously keep the toolbars minimized etc. to give the most visibility to my work product rather than the UI.
To state the obvious (to me, now that I think about it wasn't important to Microsoft) the bottom of a laptop screen is uncomfortably low--a couple inches below where one would normally place the bottom of a monitor. The screen real at the top is the most convenient for eye-level but that is the space most consumed by UI in general and the ribbon even more so. My next laptop will probably be a widescreen. In that case a ribbon will consume an even larger percentage of my screen. OpenOffice doesn't meet my firm's needs yet--though we are anxious to see how well Mozilla integrates the calendar with Thunderbird--so Microsoft, remember the laptops!
As if there was any doubt that it would.
No doubt because its beta its slower, but since MS is looking for feedback that's mine. I don't want them thinking its acceptable because "no one mentioned it during the beta".
An article from 3 months ago saying essentially the same thing, that it's a "early 2007" release.
Office 2007.
Coming soon to a store near you in 2008.
I see dead pixels!
But what we all really want to know is: What is the status of the infamous PaperClipMan(tm)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know the boss is going to have the latest and greatest version. Well, she's going to be sending out files using the latest file format and if you can't read it you're stuffed so you have to upgrade... cue network effect.
Deleted
Wow - that sure is innovation. I mean, I felt pretty advanced when the calendar said '2005' and I got a look at Office 2003.
I wish they'd stick to simple version numbers, but that would bore the marketoids, I guess.
Insert
I was actually quite looking forward to Vista until I tried it.
office 2000 ftw
I have been using the beta and after even a short time I am not surprised by the delay. Lots of places where performance needs work with Outlook being the biggest.
The focus of this release seemed to be on eye candy (the ribbon) and not on performance and ease of use. Some will say that the ribbon adds to ease of use and maybe it does. But I also find it can be cumbersome some times. If you are an occassional user of an app, it might help you use the apps and discover commands. There was a lot in these apps that epople didn't use because they couldn't find the command or figure out how to use the commands. Maybe the ribbon helps, hard to tell yet.
Using Outlook 2007 is tough because the perfoamnce is terrible. That is saying a lot given the Outlook has always been slow. I know this is a beta, but one expects a beta 2, released just 3-4 months before the expected commercial release to be pretty close to final. There are some nice changes, but too little improvement and lacking needed extra functionality.
Word seems OK, but on the ribbon there is space left over and they make you click the "editting" icon to get to find or replace, which are common operations. Strange choice especially since they give Find a spot on the bar in Powerpoint.
Desktop Search 3, which is supposed to be an integrated element is incomplete and still buggy (yes, beta, but....).
Powerpoint and Excel seem about the same.
Lots of work in integrating with Sharepoint.
My jaw dropped when I read Ars Technica's comment that Microsoft was "abandoning many years of a largely consistent user interface in favor of an almost entirely redesigned system."
Every new release of Office I've ever used has shuffled the commands into different menus, reorganized which commands are in menus, which are in toolbars, which are in both, which have shortcut keys, which do not, and what those keys are.
(Why do I have the feeling that Office's user interface decisions are made by marketing managers exercising their right to tailor Office to their personal taste, rather than by UI professionals performing user testing?)
(Yes, I am aware that Office has a sort of user-interface construction set that lets you remould all of these nearer to your heart's desire... thereby making it almost impossible for you to use any other copy of Word but your own...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
That MS realizes there isn't any new "killer app" value in the office suite? Due to that they have no pressing need to rush a new version out the door until it's what they want, and until it meets some level of quality they're shooting for. When "We're putting in ribbons!" is the huge leap forward.. you're not leaping very far.
If that's the case maybe this is a good thing in that they're trying to take their time. We all know it's not financially driven because shareholders want to see big profits before the end of this year to pick up the sagging stock price. As it is they're positioning for 2007 to be a huge year (new windows and new office in same year), which would make current shareholders somewhat unhappy. Because NOBODY buys a stock with the long term in view anymore... do they?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Actually it should be Office 2006, since the development took place during 2006, and it encompasses changes all made during 2006. Should be the same with vehicles also, I don't understand the naming scheme... nor with magazines and their dates... The July issue must be taken off shelves on July 6th, so it won't really be displayed in July, and the reporting was probably done in June? That doesn't make so much sense. Yes, yes... marketing... :P
Twinstiq, game news
Since when has Microshaft ever failed to ship a bloated and buggy product before it's time.
I remember a Gawd-aweful FORTRAN compiler (c. 1987) for DOS that Microsoft shipped with over 1200 bugs.
It was so bad that I was able to convince my Boss at the time to do let us do PC development in Turbo Pascal and keep the FORTRAN on the Mainframe.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?