I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Office 2003 appears to be falling behind in targeted sales for this point in the product’s life cycle, according to Microsoft’s own internal figures and guidelines. Just 15% of PCs are running Office 2003, two years into its life, with Office 12 - the next edition of Microsoft’s ubiquitous suite - now on the horizon. However, Microsoft traditionally expects between 50% and two thirds of customers to be running the previous version of Office when the new copy ships.
So most companies realize that you don’t need a better typewriter than Word95 to do 90% of what most users do.
Hence the MS investments into the home (MediaCenter and XBox360) and up the business food chain into Navision, Great Plains etc.
Because Longhorn Vista is probably a hardware upgrade Office12 has to span the old and the new.
As I’ve said many time before, Word is done. ‘End of Life’ it with Windows XP and Office2K3.
Time to start on a new, clean, lightweight, Avalon only, XML, style separated, version of Word. Not bloat it up to cross the gap. If MS doesn’t - a third party will.
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