Office 2007 delayed

Peter posted that Microsoft has delayed Vista the other day, and now it looks like Office is being delayed as well. That's odd because the Office team has a reputation for being good at getting products out on time to a high standard, but they've obviously failed this time with Office coming out in January 2007, at about the same time as Vista. And that's only if the deadline doesn't slip more.


This is a problem for Microsoft; InsideMicrosoft's Nathan Weinberg sums up the general feeling of intense disappointment in Microsoft. This feeling matters because Office is by quite a distance Micrsoft's biggest earner, and competition to Office is really hotting up, on the desktop and potentially more lethally for Microsoft online, with the emergence of services such as Writely (recently aquired by Google), Zoho writer, iRows and Thumbstacks. I would have thought that Microsoft would be in a great hurry to bring out Office 2007 with its greatly improved functionality and usability to attempt to stop the growth in market share of these services, and then kill them by making Office Live the best online office suite available. Well, that's what I would be trying to do if I were in charge.

Lets just hope that Microsoft manages to satisfy the expectations of the new products, 'cos if they don't, they've got problems.