Slashdot Mirror
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."
... rapid development? Oh wait, Bill told them to do rabid development.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's 2006. I just bought two 120 GB hard drives for $49.99 each--that's the out-the-door price, no rebates; and not crap, these are 5-year-warranted Seagates. Who worries about the file size of an office document? I know, I know, not everyone has huge hard drives and broadband, but do you really think people are going to shell out big bucks so a 40k Word document turns out to be 31k because it's OMGXML? It's 2006, the ony files people want to make smaller are movies.
.doc's. (See journal link below.)
XPS will not matter until everyone has the new Office and/or Vista. No one cares about making PDFs because everyone they share documents with already has Word and can read native
And blogging? Please. The reason HTML-form-based (TEXTAREA) blogging took off and products like City Desk didn't is because people don't want to have to fire up a binary app to make a web page.
The fact is, Office's biggest competitor is now... old versions of Office! (Why do you think they make those 'dinosaur' ads?) Microsoft now faces the same problems that all their competitors have faced for years.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's the typical OSS strategy. Let a commercial company spend millions of dollars in research and development, then copy the results. (And slashdotters accuse Microsoft of this tactic.) BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has a few patents in place regarding their new UI, to prevent such blatant copying by a competitor whose goal is to destroy Microsoft Office with product-dumping tactics.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000