Office 2007 Delayed Again 211
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."
cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they should just call it "Office V10", fewer crashes, with twice the big brother. Look here [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] if you're unsure what I mean.
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Interesting)
Except Office 2003 is Office v11, take a look in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11, the standard install path. Just like Windows XP is NT 5.1, and Server 2003 is NT 5.2. Marketing calls it what they want, the engineers keep things sane.
So Maybe by late next year I will be running Office v12 on NT 6.0 (or will it be 5.3? Who has the Vista beta installed?)
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:2)
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:4, Informative)
As Samuel Johnson said: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I read that as Samuel Jackson. "Depend on it, mother fucker. When a man knows he's gonna be hanged in a few weeks, it concentrates his mother fucking mind wonderfully."
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Funny)
That would save them from ever having to ship it.
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:5, Insightful)
If it were me, I'd call it Office Live or something else to promote its collaborative features. In fact I'd call it anything but Office (next version) to try and break out of the upgrade cycle. I'd probably do studies and conduct research and find the optimal work that most consumers and business favorably responded to. Didn't they just hire some Walmart and Proctor & Gamble execs?
(of course, they could always be "old fashioned" and add some ground-breaking innovative features and functionality that create a new market so they wouldn't have to rely on marketing tricks).
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:2)
Such as? Innovation is hard, that's why so few companies do it very much. What ground-breaking innovative features and functionality would you add to Office?
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:3, Interesting)
The big problem I'd like to solve is that I'd like to leverage the collective intelligence of my co-workers, past work/projects so that I don't have to work in a vacuum or re-invent the wheel unknowingly. How many problems or situations have I come across that
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:2)
From what I've been hearing, they've actually done just that with the UI. It's pretty shocking! Not that it would do me any good until (and if) they come out with a PPC Mac port or when I move to an Intel Mac.
Of course, if Vista is anything to go buy, they're delaying Office 2007 so they can remove these new features a
Re:cue the obligatory joke: (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite a few companies got burned by SA in the past few years. Pretty sure BusinessWeek covered it, or at least there were mentions in the press. There was a big push back around 2001/2002 where Microsoft was encouraging everyone to switch to SA-style purchase agreements in order to evenly spread software costs across m
Gone are the days? (Score:2)
Re:Gone are the days? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gone are the days? (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 98 release date [windowsitpro.com] - June 25, 1998
Windows 2000 release date [com.com] - Feb 17, 2000
Office 2003 release date [techtarget.com] - Oct. 21, 2003
Time to upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2)
The latest version of MS Office may have some advanced features, but for the majority of users, OO.o is sufficient I think.
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:5, Funny)
Probably... (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:2, Funny)
What a bunch of bloatware. Here's word processing the way it's meant to be done:
Re:Time to upgrade? (Score:3, Funny)
Why not use...
A:\> copy CON prn
Lost sales (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lost sales (Score:2)
Beta Version - XP Only (Score:2)
Now armed with this knowledge, people running older versions of Windows can save their bandwidth for other things.
pass the shovel (Score:3, Insightful)
Office Forever! (Score:5, Funny)
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 [3drealms.com] to redo the UI in Aero so it'll look cool under Vista, which is why their other project's a bit late, too.
Re:Office Forever! (Score:2)
Have you heard that one?
Re:When It's Done (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Open Office 2.0.3 was released today for the low low cost of NOTHING :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Open Office 2.0.3
Office 2007
Seriously people, thats centuries outdated.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
And it sucks just as much as the previous version, so you won't miss anything by upgrading!
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Interesting)
p.s. I am a programmer, so maybe they are building Office for normal people and I just don't know how to be normal.
Re:In other news... (Score:2)
I had the toughest time installing OOo 2.0.3 today. If you're upgrading from 2.0.x, be prepared for a rough ride if you deleted the "OpenOffice 2.0 Installation Files" folder since you last installed it. OOo's installer is horribly complex and broken... specifically the UNINSTALLER.
Ok so I go to install 2.0.3. I launch the meta installer, which is coded in NSIS, which makes excellent uninstallers (but OOo doesn't use that functionality). So the meta installer installs the installer just fine, and stic
Office 2007 to be shipped in 2007? (Score:3, Funny)
woo... (Score:2)
I tried it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I tried it... (Score:5, Insightful)
What was troublesome about the font changing mechanism? What didn't work about the terminal environment? What could be done to improve Outlook? Feedback is always welcome I would assume, but there isn't much that Microsoft can do without feedback explaining what you felt was wrong and how you feel it could be made better.
Re:I tried it... (Score:2)
I tried to try it, and all I got... (Score:2)
...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 wors
Re:I tried it... (Score:2)
If anyone wants specifics, reply, and I'll post details when I'm back home with my test box. The link in my
Re:I tried it... (Score:2)
Re:I tried it... (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
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!"
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
MSFT sets the standard (Score:2)
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...
Re:MSFT sets the standard (Score:3, Funny)
Be Patient (Score:2, Insightful)
You do?
Well, you shouldn't
Re:Be Patient (Score:4, Insightful)
They've shown they can justify a delay because the product is GOOD.
Microsoft has not given me the level of confidence Valve has.
Re:Be Patient (Score:2)
I'm glad - its a VERY nice upgrade, but needs more (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Informative)
Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [baychi.org] 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.
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:2)
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:2)
Office hasn't even used "real" (i.e. OS-provided) menus starting with Office97.
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Actually, it only gets rid of some (less than half) of the "menu bars, button bars, side panels, clippy agents, personal menus and other cruft". The UI is terribly inconsistent between applications: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Acces have the "ribbon". In Outlook, some of the windows have the new "ribbon", s
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:2)
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:2)
I would love it if MS sued an open source project for patent infringement. It would be the best day ever. They would end up being humiliated like SCO did. They are too cowardly to sue. They will license it to a third party and fund their suit like they did with SCO.
Re:Listen to Jensen Harris Before Deciding (Score:3, Insightful)
Case-in-point:
O2K (Word) I don't know how to reproduce this - but sometimes when I rt.click on a number-list, and look for "bullets and numbering" in the so-called context menu, it's not there. Or sometimes it's there, and it's greyed out. So then I go up to the menu bar and select Format->Bullets and Numbering - to
Re:I'm glad - its a VERY nice upgrade, but needs m (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm glad - its a VERY nice upgrade, but needs m (Score:2)
Oops (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oops (Score:2)
Care to post a link to instructions? 'cause OOo 2 just gave me a blank page when I tried to open a file with it.
Licensing 6.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Licensing 6.0 (Score:2)
What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:5, Funny)
Things that most users will use once they start using Word 2007:
* the new, smaller XML file format.
* Saving as XPS or PDF.
* Blogging.
For the first time in awhile, there's an office upgrade that's really worth getting.
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, not really.
PDF with Word you can get by either going through the hassle of installing a second printer subsystem, the frustration of getting a sub-par system for a modest fee, or the expense of buying a software package whose cost can equal that of Word.
Blogging -- there is no in-Word blogging for any system prior than 2007. Period. At best, you can get an ugly cut-and-paste that will either get you no benefit or just give you bloat.
And if you think that only tech-savy users want PDFs or Blogging, you've spent too much time navel gazing.
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:2)
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:2)
I can't, and neither can Grandma, after she heard that Outlook has viruses.
If PDF was a compelling feature people would have switched to open office by now.
If OOo was 100% feature-complete with Word, I would have. But it's not, and it's not in ways that make it not worth the effort for me (or virtually anyone else I know) to use it.
The new format?? Who the hell cares about that.
Everyone who's ever complained about Office's proprietary file type,
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:2)
XML format: If I want a good XML file format, I'd sooner trust OpenOffice
XPS: why would I want that?
PDF: you can get decent PDF creation with free software. There are a bunch of different options. I like CutePDF [cutepdf.com]
Blogging: Who in their right mind would pay hundreds of dollars for a Microsoft Word upgrade, just so they can use Word to post to their blog? There are loads of ways to post to your weblog, free options, and MS Word seems like it's more than overkill. In fact, for what most people use Word fo
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, for real XML I trust neither. But since it's an XML based format for either, I can "trust" that even if the software spontaneously dies everywhere tomorrow, I can get my thesis/paper/novel into something i can keep working on. (I've noted the non-obvious benefits elsewhere.)
XPS: why would I want that?
Because it's not PDF, but does the same task. And unlike the bastardized MDI format from XP-2003, XPS is actually going to h
Re:What's in it that would make me want to buy it? (Score:2, Troll)
XPS will not matter until everyone has th
Oh no's! (Score:4, Funny)
/sarcasm
is this the MS Office which is part of the OS? (Score:2)
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
Geeze (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Geeze (Score:2, Insightful)
What microsoft needs to do is FIX the problems that everyone complains about, and THEN they will become pointless to say
Example: Politicians are corrupt. Millions of people every day claim politicians are corrupt, and yet, in many cases, it's true, so the complaint is bloody well valid!
As for the 90%/10% jab, you realize this is
Re:Geeze (Score:4, Funny)
Thank god MS has people like you to stand up for them. What would they ever do without you defending them against the unwashed masses!.
BTW: My favorite corporation is maytag. I hang out at washing machine forums and defend maytag anytime anybody critizes them, says their products are not that good, or mocks them.
I think people who critize corporations are so sad. They probably still live in their mothers basement or something. If they were adults they too would adopt a corporation and defend them valiently on public forums. Too bad there are not more people like you and me.
Old news, reported already by Ars 3 mo. ago? (Score:2)
Not surprised - too much focus on eye candy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Could the reason be... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Well at least.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Office 97 vs Office 2007 (Score:2)
Re:Office 97 vs Office 2007 (Score:2)
Re:OpenOffice FTW! (Score:2)
Re:OpenOffice FTW! (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, if you need spreadsheets that big, you don't need spreadsheets--you need a database.
Re:OpenOffice FTW! (Score:2)
Re:My First Experience with OpenOffice (Score:2)
OOo 2.0.x does have its issues but it's nothing like the 1.x piece of crap you tried in the distant past.
Re:My First Experience with OpenOffice (Score:2)
Do you make a habit of announcing your intent to commit illegal acts in public forums?
You'd better pray that you never, ever have any ex-employees who read Slashdot, because you have just handed them ammunition for a massive la
Re:My First Experience with OpenOffice (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My First Experience with OpenOffice (Score:2)
This is one of my biggest complaints about OpenOffice. Yeah, OpenOffice 2.0 is much better than the 1.x series was, but basically they just made it a bad clone of Microsoft Office. I find many of the cloned MS Office features difficult to use, and they usually won't accomplish what I need them to. I'd love to see the OpenOffice people take a fresh approach to office
Re:Blah (Score:3, Informative)
Re:new ribbon on laptops (Score:3, Interesting)
The best part, though? A quick double click to any of the ribbon headers hides the whole thing. That turns it very minimalistic.