Microsoft’s recent $8.5 billion purchase of Skype is close to being officially completed (pending international anti-trust go-ahead) and it’s first appearance will be in Office 365, Microsoft’s just launched cloud offering.
Kurt Delbene, MS Business Division President said:
“Office 365 will be the lead offering along with the client that should drive parity”
Client, in this case, means Office so does that mean there will be a separate “Skype” component in Office 15 or, more likely, will “Lync” simply connect to both?
Talking of the next version of Office, Mr Delbene had some info on that too.
Talking about when we can expect the next version of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, he said:
“We’re typically in a 2 1/2 year cycle”
which would put Office 15 (as I’m calling it for now) at June-December 2012. I’m not too sure about that as it is likely that will be the release schedule for Windows 8 too…I feel that trying to promote new versions of their 2 biggest products at the same time could be tricky.
Although if my prediction that Windows 8 will have a much bigger consumer focus is right,that could make it easier for Redmond’s marketing teams. Predominantly push Windows to consumers and predominantly push Office to enterprises…do you think that could work?
Wikipedia, via Neowin, also tells us that:
“notable changes in Excel include a tool for filtering data in a storm, the ability to convert Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, and the integration of advanced trigonometric functions. In Word, the capability of inserting video and audio online as well as the broadcasting of documents on the Web were implemented”
For more info, head over to the Seattle Times sites here.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 