Office 2007 Lives Up (Or Down) To Its Name

Office 2007, which had been slated to be broadly available at the end of 2006, will now be broadly available in January 2007.

A spokeswoman confirmed this Thursday night, two full days after the now-infamous Vista delay was announced.

As with Vista, volume license customers will be able to get their spanky-new "Office bits" in November. But if you were say, wanting to buy Office at retail, or on a PC, you'll just cool your heals till the post-holiday sales.

It makes sense, But given this company's incredibly shrinking credibility, one might have thought this tidbit would have been mentioned on Tuesday's call announcing the Vista slip.

It was not.

On the one hand, it makes sense to sync up the releases, although Office 2007 does not require Vista. On the other hand, common sense (and decency) might suggest Microsoft be more forthcoming and let this news out all at once.

The spokeswoman maintained that the vast majority of Office users are on volume licenses. Office 2003 was first made available to volume customers in October of that year. But in that case, Office was broadly available at least in the year it was supposed to ship.

Even company insiders were stunned at this turn of events.

While it's plausible that the Office team regrouped in the wake of the Vista tardiness, they should have certainly done so earlier and more publicly. "Brain dead" was one term used by an insider.

It again begs the question of whether anyone at Microsoft actually talks to anyone else at Microsoft.

For Microsoft to officially say this is no big deal is again, simply not credible.

What do you think? Is the Office/Vista slip/nonslip a 1: catastrophe 2: nuisance 3: non-event 4: good thing?

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