Microsoft Announces Office 2016 and Office For Windows 10 Coming Later This Year
An anonymous reader writes At its Windows 10 event yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the touch-optimized version of Office. Today, the company offered more details about that version, and then snuck in another announcement: the next desktop version is under development, it is called Office 2016, and it will be generally available "in the second half of 2015." Office for Windows 10 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook), meanwhile, is also slated to arrive later this year, though Microsoft has shared more about it and plans to offer a preview in the coming weeks. These new Office apps will be pre-installed (they will be free) on smartphones and small tablets running Windows 10. They will also be available to download from the Windows Store for other devices.
Windows 10 is Windows 8.1 with a Windows 7 Start Menu - it really isn't a big change, so think of it as SP3 (Windows 8.1 was SP1 for Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 Update was SP2). It will be a free upgrade for Windows 8 users, and - given that MS is finally taking its tablet market seriously - is likely to have efficiency improvements rather than bloat.
I'm still surprised how fast Windows 8.1 works on my low end HP Stream tablet - this isn't the company that brought you Vista any more.
(Of course, few'll take the Metro interface seriously until there is a method to sideload Metro apps on non-developer machines without shelling out $3000+ for a volume pack of licenses - most economic activity does not take place in enterprise or hobbyist markets, but among small businesses, and MS used to understand this.)
>> WTF happened to Office 365
It will be renamed "Office 362" when the statistics will show 3 days downtime per year :))))
Or perhaps "Office 363" on leap years :)
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