Office 12: Not Necessarily For Longhorn

Office 12, the next release of the powerhouse productivity suite, is slated to support Windows XP, Windows 2000 and oh, yeah, Longhorn when it ships, company insiders say.

That comes as news to many who thought they knew Microsoft's game plan. But according to Microsoft, that's not really news at all. "We have said as we look forward that we will look at going on in Windows and will take advantage of the platform that is out there," said Dan Leach, group product manager of Office.

Microsoft knows it would be folly to leave the millions of Windows XP and 2000 users out in the cold and force an upgrade to the shiny, new and radically different Longhorn version of Windows, which is now expected in 2007 or later. Office 12 initially was slated to ship with Longhorn, but the next-generation Windows platform slipped and Office didn't, according to one insider. "The Office team is disciplined. They nail down their feature set, set a schedule and usually hit it," the insider said.

With many volume licenses lasting three years, the pressure is on Microsoft to deliver major customer-pleasing upgrades within that time frame. That means the next Office would have to ship by October 2006, and no one expects Longhorn to make its debut by then. If Microsoft can roll out the new Office with significant enhancements under that schedule, it might ease some corporate users' angst.

Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, recently told CRN that he felt good about the timeline for Office 12 and about volume-license renewal rates. He declined to specify dates, however.

"We've worked hard to ship new versions [of Office] every 24 to 36 months. Upgrades are typically two to three years apart, and we've got a good track record doing that," Capossela said.

Yet that staggered release cycle raises a perennial upgrade problem. If an application is radically new and designed from the ground up for an upcoming operating system, it will showcase new features but also be beyond the reach of scores of users who aren't ready to move to the new operating system yet. On the other hand, if an application offers backward compatibility, it won't take full advantage of what's new and different in the operating system.

The first sign that Microsoft was going to cushion the move to Longhorn came last fall at its Professional Developers Conference, where on-stage demonstrations stressed that Longhorn would be able to run legacy applications. Indeed, one demo featured 20-year-old VisiCalc running unmodified in a Longhorn window.

One Microsoft partner said the fact that Office 12 won't be Longhorn-only is known in some circles, but Microsoft has allowed people to think what they want. "At this point, it's fairly obvious that--intentionally or not--Microsoft let people think that this would be a Longhorn release of Office," he said, adding that the company has been talking to partners and customers about its Office platform support going forward, but in closed settings.

Still, some industry observers say it's a good sign that the various Microsoft teams are doing their own thing. "This shows that the Microsoft organization is healthy. You see some constructive tension between the Office team and the Longhorn team," said Peter O'Kelly, senior analyst at the Burton Group. "Steve Sinofsky runs this multibillion dollar Office group and has to keep the lights on, regardless of Longhorn schedules." Sinofksy is senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Group and drives Office development.

At the same time, O'Kelly noted, Microsoft must do right by Longhorn when it finally arrives. "Longhorn with a slightly tweaked Office 2003 won't suffice. They need to do something fairly radical for the Information Worker experience in Longhorn," he said. "That's why I suspect they will ultimately surprise the market and split the Office brand--maybe an 'Office Classic' and something new for Longhorn."