MICROSOFT has delayed releasing its Office word-processing, email and spreadsheet program so it can improve its performance and design.
Office 2007 for businesses, which was to be released in October, will now be unveiled a few weeks later, but before the end of the year, vice-president Antoine Leblond says.
It will be available in stores in January as planned, he says.
The delay is a setback for Microsoft, which has struggled to release its Office and Windows products on time.
The company announced in March that the new version of Windows would not be out for Christmas and Office sales slowed last quarter as customers waited for the new product.
“This is another black eye around scheduling and Microsoft,” Directions on Microsoft analyst Greg DeMichillie says.
“This could mean another quarter of slow growth for Office.”
Microsoft had already delayed the retail availability of Office to January to coincide with the release of Windows Vista.
Leblond, who was appointed in May to run the Office Productivity Applications group, says more than 2.5 million people are using the second test version of Office 2007, and Microsoft is tracking which parts aren’t performing.
The company has decided to take extra time to fix some of the top features that aren’t running as quickly as they should.
Office 2007 overhauls the program’s familiar design, so Microsoft is tracking whether users are having difficulty finding features they need. That will be fixed as well, Leblond says.
Microsoft has decided to improve the product instead of trying to drive relentlessly towards a specific date, he says.
“We feel like we have a responsibility to ship the best software we can,” he says.
Most business customers test new versions of Office for several quarters and stop buying the older version for a few quarters before a new release, so delays can lead to an additional period with slower growth.
Few business customers are likely to begin testing Office 2007 immediately, whether it comes out in October or December, Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox says.
“October, November, December is all about the same, and what business is going to tell its information technology staff to test a new version during the holidays,” he says.
Microsoft has decided to postpone by six weeks the release of the next Office test, called Beta 2 Tech Refresh, Leblond says.
It’s not clear how long the final version will be delayed and Microsoft probably won’t know until after the Tech Refresh is released and tested, he says.
The PowerPoint slide show program is also running behind schedule because Microsoft has made a lot of changes to it for the new version.
Leblond says the company has reassigned software testers from other Office products to help finish PowerPoint.
