Microsoft launches Office 15 Technical Preview Program
Discreet few to bug test next Office build
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
The next version of Microsoft’s productivity suite, codenamed Office 15, is being sent out to a few brave customers this morning.
The Technical Preview Program for Office 15 kicked off Monday morning, as Redmond sent out the code and the preliminary interoperability documentation. The list of testers is already full, and they’ve all had to sign Redmond’s fearsomely strict NDA contracts – and, presumably, have IT profiles that fit the types of environments Redmond wants to test.
“Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division,” said Office development veep PJ Hough in a statement.
With Office 15, Microsoft will try to simultaneously update mobile, possibly fondleslab, desktop, server, and cloud versions of Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. That's a lot of code to go wrong.
There’s also the integration of Skype to consider – which wasn’t mentioned, but must be on the cards if Microsoft is going to stand any change of recouping the $8.5bn it spent on the company. Skype is being touted by Redmond as a natural fit of the Office platform, particularly for cloud services, but there’ll surely be a few technical gremlins to work out along the way.
The code will go to public beta this summer, once the Technical Preview Program participants have identified the major break points. ®
COMMENTS
Code Bloat
Office 2003 already had enough features. Why bother with Office 2013?
Bloat and Churn for the sake of Bloat and Churn.
AC of Monday 30th January 2012 23:29 GMT
> WHY not just get it right to start with.
Do please enlighten us with your strategy for getting large software systems right on the first release.
Meanwhile back in the real world developers (not just those in the corporation you love to hate) will need to improve large systems by working through a progressive test program, including the controlled beta release seen in this article.
It's user base. The whole point of things like Skype is that it enables you to communicate with other people, and if everyone you know is using Skype but not other VOIP platforms, you are more likely to use Skype.
Having said that, Skype's share of the entire telecoms market, in particular international calls where there is the biggest saving to be made, is pretty close to saturation point, so their current revenue and growth potential does not justify the money paid for it.
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