Next version of Microsoft Office is "Office 14"

As stated, the codename for the upcoming release of Office, currently slated for a 2009/2010 release timeframe, is Office “14.” Extending on the mention of superstition in the description of this article, in response to a comment regarding “Office 13” in a TechNet radio chat in December of 2006, Eric Vigesaa, Program Manager for Office system client applications, stated “ell, 13 is unlucky, so we’re calling it Office 14,” so the next time someone wants to question Microsoft’s belief in superstition, one need not question any further. Naturally, with the beginning of a project comes planning… and in the world Microsoft lives in, it takes money to make the planning come alive; LOTS of it, so just how much is Microsoft committing to spend on Office “14?” ~20% in R&D funding than Office “12” with total R&D expenditure expected to be around $930 million PER YEAR!

Here’s a term for you: Office System.

It’s important to start familiarizing yourself with the notion that almost no major product within Microsoft is ever final. Products reach a phase where, yes, they are released to manufacturers but as soon as the product reaches that state, it’s on to the next phase and building off of the most recent binaries. It’s a cycle: stable plateaus are reached and development continues from it.

In lieu of the aforementioned, a lot of the innovations that go into the Office System are long-term investments which build upon the foundation and functionality delivered in previous releases; in this case, Office “14” will initially take away and benefit from Office “12.”

These are the current bets Microsoft is making for Office “14” but as previously noted, the details are destined to change:

Three major organization-wide areas of investigation and investment will be “Enterprise Content Management,” which pertains to the authoring, management, and organization of complex documents and content, “Communication and Collaboration,” which pertains to keeping communities, co-workers, partners, and customers in sync, and finally, “Business Process and Business Intelligence,” which involves making the right information available throughout the process of doing business. At the center of these three areas is “Individual Impact” which is explained as helping businesses amplify the impact of their people/customers.

At the base are what are described as the Office Business Platform and Manageability & Security. The notion of each is to make it simple to build client and web-based business applications and making worldwide deployment reliable, secure and easily manageable. Some key points that Microsoft references are focus on enterprise with emphasis on empowering the individual, an end-to-end solution viewpoint ranging from the individuals working in the Office system programs they’re familiar with to the enterprise servers providing the capabilities to address organizational needs to “cloud services” providing capabilities and/or assistance to users, and lastly, these commitments aren’t a one-release focus; they are long-term commitments.

News Source: www.aeroxp.org