Microsoft seems to be trying to move the focus away from Vista, by leaking the fact that the next revision of Office will be out in 2009.

The why is at once, both clear, and a mystery.

It is clear that the dollars are not flowing with as much volume as Redmond would like, due to the less than popular Vista adoption. Office, which is more of a cash cow than the operating system, was given some bad reviews when released, but soon it was business as usual – which meant that purchase of large quantities of the product were happening.

What is not so clear is that if focus was in place at Microsoft, the team of coders working on the next iteration of Office would be shifted to either maintenance duty for Vista or re-purposed to work on Windows 7. No one at Microsoft gets, or cares to get, the concept of ‘all hands on deck’ where a concentrated effort is put forth to work problems overdue for repair.

No matter the amounts of money that the Office Suite brings in, Microsoft is first and foremost an Operating Systems company – and the current black eye that division has needs to be healed.

from ComputerWorld

A leak on a Microsoft Corp. Web site referring to a product in the Office suite hints at a 2009 release for the next version of the productivity suite, currently code-named Office 14.

On Monday, Microsoft revealed a podcasting kit for Office SharePoint Server, the portal product in the Office family, with an accompanying question-and-answer article on its CodePlex site for developers that includes information about the product.

The site made reference to Office SharePoint 2009, which hints that the next version of Office will be named Office 2009 and released that year. Microsoft has not officially revealed a timeline for Office 14.

The site no longer has a reference to SharePoint 2009, however. Once the reference was reported on, Microsoft changed the wording on the site to erase it. In addition, the author of the post tacked on a note to the blogger who first reported the information, saying the Q&A was a transcript from a conversation with customers and was inaccurate about the name of the next version of Office.

“I honestly have no idea how the next release of SharePoint will be named, I promise,” said the note, which was signed “Ludo” for Ludo Fourrage, a Microsoft group product manager. “Thanks for your interest in PKS.” PKS, or Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, is an open-source initiative that helps customers develop and deploy podcasts using SharePoint.

Microsoft has released scant details about Office 14, the follow-up to the current Office 2007 software, and its release date was not included.

Last month, the company said it would support the latest specification for the XML-based file format Open Office XML in Office 14. OOXML is a rival to Open Document Format; both have been approved as international standards by the ISO, although OOXML’s approval is being contested by some countries’ standards bodies.

Good luck on that last challenge. It has been widely reported that Microsoft is currently unable to support the OXML standard, since ISO forced certain changes in the format. (this could keep the crew busy for quite some time, but that should not worry those who wish for a new version – Microsoft has shown a few times it has no problem with early release of beta code, cleverly disguised as finished product.)

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