Office 2007 is running late. Microsoft officials acknowledged on June 29 that the company will not meet the October 2006 business-availability target to which it committed in March of 2006. At that time, Microsoft officials said to expect retail availability of Office 2007 to be some time in January 2007, so as to coincide with the Vista launch. But on June 29, Microsoft revised its schedule. Now Microsoft is promising that Office 2007 will be available to volume licensees “by the end of year 2006”, with retail availability in “early 2007”. This does not stop MS from pondering about Vista’s successor, though.
Office 2007 not going to be available in 2006? How odd.
…you see it coming from afar.
What a view.
OS X Leopard…it sorta sneaks up on you.
Edited 2006-06-29 22:13
Ok, now that was kinda funny. People, if you’re going to talk trash, do it like this
…you see it coming from afar.
What a view.
They should rename ‘Windows Vista’ ‘Windows Mirage’. No matter how far or fast you travel, it never seems to get any closer.
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.
nope, it’s pretty much every software shop is like this.
Blizzard games come to mind.
BTW nice hate post.
I mean, both Vista and Office 2007? The ONLY reason we moved from Win2000 to XP, was support (i.e. unavailability of it). Sure, with such strongarming, Vista can be forced on anyone, but this time people are going to do it even more grudgingly than in the case of XP.
Exact same goes for Office.
I thought it was a nice touch that MS is starting to talk about the successor to Vista 🙂
I wonder if the next version will have most of the things that they said Longhorn/Vista would have?
Too be honest, I do hope that MS gets back on track and gets their dev problems sorted out. I have too machines waiting for Vista so I have been hoping it would be at least something worth waiting for. I downloaded the first public beta and thought it was a little better than XP… Oh well… (I know, I know, it’s all under the hood right)…
I guess the advantage Apple has with Leopard is that they didn’t announce what it would have (yet), so if they need to remove things before August, we’ll never know… 🙂
I think that Microsoft is becoming conscious that they need to rewrite the whole system, or just restart ground up.
All the plans on dropping stuff and problems with the huge codebase.
Long long shot here but this is what I think.
Tell me something new.. Microsoft’s delays aren’t news anymore 🙂
P.S. – To read while taking a cup of your favourite bevearage.
Edited 2006-06-29 23:05
“Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don’t exist largely today,” Barnett said
I suppose, for incredibly narrow values of “exist”.
I don’t suppose he meant that these technologies don’t exist on the _Windows_ platform today… that would be the best way to turn this statement into something that’s actually true.
I won’t go so far as to claim that all other software platforms for potentially multicore architectures have “large” support for thread-level parallelism, but I will claim that all of Windows’ viable competitors have more thread-friendly process management than does Windows. In other words, Microsoft is not the industry leader in supporting multicore architectures. Not on the desktop, and certainly not on the server.
Like any other Microsoft PR statement, however, they imply that they are breaking new ground and tackling complicated problems that only Microsoft could hope to conquer. Microsoft… solving yesterday’s problems for a brighter today–by sometime tomorrow.
Like any other Microsoft PR statement, however, they imply that they are breaking new ground and tackling complicated problems that only Microsoft could hope to conquer. Microsoft… solving yesterday’s problems for a brighter today–by sometime tomorrow.
All major players are working on tomorrow’s problems and some of todays. Microsoft is ONE of those players.
It’s not like all the other players already have all the best solutions to the problems that exist and is predicted to come as multicore takes over.
IBM, Sun, others, could say EXACTLY the same thing. Would you then complain about THEIR PR? I think you complain now only because it’s MS that said these things.
IBM and Sun created JFS2 and ZFS respectively and routinely build big irons with dozens of CPUs, so if the likes of them were talking about problem solving in the arenas of, say, multithreading and advanced storage, it might be worth a listen. But MS PR talking about how they’re pondering finally working to catch up to the current state of the desktop CPU industry with some possible future release of their dominant software platform? That strikes me as less than impressive, and I see no reason not to let them know it.
Um.. Microsoft is talking about on a desktop OS. It’s sligthly different.
The delays don’t even bother me anymore. It’s business as usual. What I find bothersome is all the talk about Vista’s successor. How can you even talk about the successor to something that isn’t even finished yet? Worry about that first.
I wonder what would make a better operating system than what we have already. What does Microsoft mean by “leveraging multicore processors”? Isn’t that just a case of making programs multithreaded? What about the kernel? Unless MS manages to make a usable exo/micro kernel what more can they do different from what is already available. My guess is that Microsoft will promise all the buzzwords possible before their succesor to Vista ships but in the end it will be just another NT kernel, perhaps with more .NET applications riding on top of it than Vista has. By then you probably won’t find many applications using C/C++ in any operating system anyway. I don’t see exciting technology in Microsoft’s future. To be honest I haven’t seen much from then for 5 or 6 years to get excited about and most of that ended up being vapourware anyway.
You always talk about the next thing before you finish what you’re doing now, believe it or not but it’s often what defines the next release: What you won’t be doing in it.
See, Microsoft doesn’t just employ mainline developers and testers, they also employ people who are better at designing big things: They’re not gonna be real busy right now.
If Microsoft didn’t know where it was going after Vista I’d be concerned.
If Microsoft didn’t know where it was going after Vista I’d be concerned.
I’m concerned because it doesn’t look like Microsoft even knows where it is going with Vista. That should be the primary concern. Features are dropped left and right, and release dates have been pushed back by years. At this point it’s ok to forget about what comes after Vista, and focus on correcting repeated blunders. There is no sense betting on the future if you can’t even make it through the present.
You’ll all see… 2007 WILL be the year of the vista desktop.
Now *that* was funny b-)
owww my ears hurt…I have been hearing that for years now
The release is going to coincide with the release of Duke Nukem Forever!!
Sorry…couldn’t resist…
A signed deal has been made with Take Two Interactive to bundle Duke Nukem Forever with Vista and make it exclusive to the platfom. Unfortunately this also means that Vista will not be released for another 10 years in order to make improvements to the codebase under the advice of Take Two.
Can someone explain just how this screws businesses under licensing 6.0 as I keep hearing.
Pretty simple.
Licensing 6.0 means that a company will pay a sum every year to microsoft (based on the number of licensed machines), and in turn they not only will perceive a smaller cost (it is spread over years) they will receive all the new versions for FREE! Yay for us!
Only…
If you do your math you discover you are actually paying *more* than buying the old volume licenses, and…
…there were NO new versions of whatever since the start of Licensing 6.0!!!
(except maybe Win2k3 server)
So they are paying good money every year, and they get exactly *nothing*.
If that’s not business genius, I don’t know what it is…
(or maybe I know: it’s called robbery =) )
I say there is no reason to bring out Vista in January, wait until late July/Aug for the back to school sales.
Offer people that buy a computer from January-Aug without Vista on it a free upgrade.
Then just take their time getting this thing done right.
Oh no, that’s too kind. How about releasing in September, at the end, right _after_ back to school sales. You might sell a few extra box packages
.
in addition, now for many of the early adopters to get vista “for free” they will have to sign up for the program Again… see Microsoft won’t sell to corperate customers without SA anymore… once you’re in the program you must purchase everything MS thru it.. the only way around it would be to by Retail, Boxed which is even more expensive (and wastful) on an enterprise level.
Lets hope that the new Sharepoint Portal Server will be on time.
I like my beers and whiskeys, but this is one toast to which I will choose not to drink.
Here’s to rescuing corporate IT from the proprietary lock-in of Microsoft business collaboration software. <klink> <gulp> ahhhh…
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it interesting that in two consecutive news posts we have:
Office 2007 Slips; Will Vista Be Next?
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=15051
OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Released
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=15050
Not interesting at all… OOo 2.0.3 is a small maintenance release while Office 2007 is a major new version release.
And I think it’s better that they slip on the release date to fix issues that can be fixed in time, rather than release and have patches available right away because some snotty manager insisted on keeping a release date.
“Microsoft… solving yesterday’s problems for a brighter today–by sometime tomorrow.”
Now that’s a keeper.
Vista like debian:
It come then would be time to come
Vista not laike debian:
Wait for sp2 if you want to use some sort of stable system
Wow some good comments on this one.
“Merely having size and resources isn’t necessarily in this instance an advantage”
That couldn’t be more true. I haven’t made a final judgement, but if Vista turns out how I think it will and the next version of Windows takes another 5+ years I’m going to have to declare Window’s code KIA. They need to stop trying to rewrite / patch an old (some might say bad) design and start fresh. It might cost them, but not as much as continuing this pattern will.
Edited 2006-06-30 12:49
I’m going to scratch this one up to the monopoly effect. Why does Microsoft take so long to add features everyone else has had for years? Because they can. I’m not saying they do it on purpose, just that it’s a natural result of the lack of competition that a monopoly like theirs creates. They control the vast majority of the PC OS market, with OS X and Linux only making up a small percentage. As discussed in other topics many businesses are more of less dependent on Microsoft. Many users know nothing else, and no matter how badly Microsoft treats them they are afraid to try something else.
Just look at what happened with IE. They used their monopoly to help kill Netscape, and then more or less completely stopped improving their browser. Only after Firefox had gained significant market share did they start trying to fix IE. If they manage to kill Firefox (unlikely at this point) you can bet good money the same exact thing will happen again.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: monopolies are bad for everyone who doesn’t own their stock (and sometimes even them). Just look at what Microsoft is doing in its new markets – like with the XBOX. They don’t innovate, they don’t even try to offer something better or different. They just launch huge advertising campaigns, buy companies to make games for them, and lose billions of dollars keeping the cost of their product low enough to try to outsell the competition. When they don’t have a monopoly to count on they flounder, which sucks for everybody. Bah, we’ll see whether or not Sony has made the biggest mistake in console history – if they have Microsoft just might have another monopoly under their belts and Nintendo will become Apple’s counterpart.
Capitalism is very pragmatic, but it does have fatal weaknesses. Microsoft is a good example of one of them.
Edited 2006-06-30 13:36
This is extraordinarily pathetic of MS! No wonder Billy G is stepping down from the helm!
Wow, that was like every comment on slashdot’s article all rolled into one. Uniformed, jumping to huge conclusions and made of incomprehensible logic.
then if they are planning to release an office “2007” for os x (intel version..), it may released during 2008..
Vista has been plagued by poor management; namely, an inability to draw a line in the sand and make tough technology schedule decisions. For the past 5 years, MS management never actually set a realistic ship date. Technologies like WinFS were allowed to churn interminably without achieving critical mass. Managed code wound its way into the Windows Shell and was cut way too late, long after it had become obvious that it wasn’t possible to meet memory and performance goals in the short-term. All the while, management kind of ignored the problem and let the project run on auto-pilot. This is one of the reasons why Jim Allchin was removed as head of Windows and why Steven Sinofsky has been brought in to instill ship discipline. In short, Windows was a ship without a captain — or a rudder. I believe that Sinofsky will get the ship under control, though. He has a good track record for shipping, and he’s a strong personality. He’s already put a lot of his old Office lieutenants in new positions of authority within the Windows organization. So I expect things to change. Dramatically.
Just my opinion, of course.