Microsoft delays Office 2008 Microsoft's MBU seems to have been infected by the company's delay-virus lately. They first wanted to have an intel-compatible version of Office ready for 2007 and promised file-compatibility with the Windows-version of the software package for Office 2004. They then postponed the Office update to the second half of 2007 and the file-compatibility has only seen beta-versions so far.
Now, Microsoft has released information that Office:mac 2008 will only be released in mid-Januar 2008. (Should it be called 2009, then, because it seems strange that the 'version number' actually relates to the year of release?) They've also scrapped the public beta version of Office 2008, saying they'd rather test internally and with a circle of selected beta-testers. (Read: You really don't want to use the package in production systems just yet.) Furthermore, a "Special Media Edition" (499 compared to the standard 399 USD version) will include some sort of "iPhoto light", it seems. And the 149 USD students and teachers version won't have that and will also have to skip Exchange-compatibility.
Basically, today Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit has released uninteresting news (the iPhoto light part) within a bunch of bad news. I'm not impressed. - posted by Patrick Armbruster @ 12:07 [article link]