Office 14 Not Coming This Year Says Ballmer

Every year, good ol’ Steve Ballmer shows up to Wall Street for his annual “Strategic Update” briefing with analysts on February 24. Despite rising anticipation, the Microsoft CEO said Office 14 won’t be shipping in 2009. MS execs more than a few times last year hinted that the latest enterprise software package would be seen in 2009. Customers can expect to see a beta version this summer, but don’t expect the real thing to drop until at least Q1 2010. Despite some issues with bugs at the moment, Windows 7 is still set to release in Q3 of this year. Why they wouldn’t want to release the latest versions of Windows and Office at the same time, I have no idea. Ballmer must have something up his sleeve if he is willing to wait that long to release an ugraded software package. It leaves companies like SalesForce and ZoHo a whole year to perfect their cloud solutions, further eating away at the gian’t market share.