Microsoft is set to
refresh its aging Office for Mac productivity suite later this year. According
to to Thorsten Hübschen, Business Group Lead at Microsoft Germany, news about
the new version of Office should come during the second quarter of 2014, with a
final product planned for release by the year's end.
The revelation came during an interview with German publication Computerwoche
at CeBit 2014.
The current version
of Office for the Mac was released more than three years ago in October of
2010. While development on Apple’s platform has historically lagged behind its
Windows counterpart by about a year, the current timeline would put the Mac
release almost two years apart. The company originally had plans to release
Office for Mac in the spring of 2014, but it appears it will miss that
timeline. Hübschen says a reorganization in 2010 that merged the Mac
development team with the wider business software group is what caused the
delay.
Office 365
subscribers will automatically get the next version of Office for Mac when it’s
ready.
In related news
last month reports emerged suggesting that development on Office for iPad had been sped up with the goal of launching during the first half
of 2014. If that’s the case we should see the touch friendly version of
Microsoft’s productivity suite arrive before its desktop counterpart on the
Mac.
~ Jose Vilches
0 comments:
Post a Comment