Another day in the Office
Microsoft will push Office 2010 out the door [Window?] by June 2010, the company has confirmed.
Betas of the new super-fast application suite have been floating about for a few weeks now, but after much speculation about when Office 2010 would finally become available to the general public, a Microsoft spokesperson conceded to Betanews that it would be June of next year.
The site also reports that after a conversation with the Redmond giant's senior director of communications, Janice Kapner, it's clear Microsoft will try to diversify and cater to a more web-based crowd whilst trying to keep hold of its more traditional clientèle.
Discussing the firm's upcoming online offerings, Kapner said "The key to what will and what won't be in the Web Apps is really based on customer feedback and usage scenarios."
She said the firm had "500 million users," so far and needed to "talk to them a lot about what it is they do and don't do, and will and won't do."
Kapner also said that as this would be the first shipment of the Web Apps, Microsoft was managing its expectations and being "very realistic about how we think people will use these things and try to supply features and functionality that will support those usage scenarios."
Having said that, the cloud may be on the horizon, but it's certainly not unlimited, with Microsoft already insisting that anything above simple document creation and editing will require a full blown version of Office.
"Do we push all of the functionality of Word into the cloud when we know people aren't going to use it for things like a big, rich term paper?" she asked, answering her own question with an emphatic "No."
Instead, Kapner said her firm would "continue to add functions and features as people's usage of cloud-based solutions evolve, [and] so will our Web Apps."
Want to see what all the fuss is about? The Microsoft Office 2010 Beta is available as a free download at microsoft.com/office/2010.
