Microsoft started to publicise details of Microsoft Office 2010, aka Office 14*, at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans today. The main news is that Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 "have reached the technical preview engineering milestone". These are pre-beta versions, not suitable for production use. There should be a public beta later this year, with the final release "in the first half of 2010".
For the first time, there will be separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions, which should encourage people planning to move to 64-bit computing with Windows 7.
For consumers, Microsoft says it will make versions of some programs free online in web-based versions, probably as part of Windows Live. Office Web Applications are not the full applications, but they feature the ribbon user interface, and look leagues ahead of Google Docs. The catch is that the Office Web apps use Microsoft's SharePoint server (which is used today for the Office Live site). However, Microsoft has been demonstrating them running in Firefox and Safari, not just in IE.
Companies that subscribe to Office -- Microsoft says it has 90 million "Office annuity customers" -- will be able to host it on their own servers. Another option is Microsoft Online Services, sold on a subscription basis as part of a hosted offering.
Office 2007 made a dramatic leap forward with the introduction of the ribbon user interface but the transition was far from complete. The new versions of Outlook, OneNote, Publisher and SharePoint now have ribbons, too. In addition, users can customise what now seems to be called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface.
Microsoft has reduced the number of Office packages from eight to five, and the new low-end options give users an extra application. The cheap Office Home and Student edition now includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, Office Home and Business edition adds Outlook, and the Standard version now includes Publisher.
There are some new features, too, but the preview versions are not all feature-complete. However, "paste preview" looks like being one of the most popular.
There are video demonstrations on the Office 2010 site.
All round, Office 2010 does little more than complete the job of transitioning to Office 2007's innovative system, while adding a bit of polish. The new stuff is in the Office Web Applications online suite, and it's too soon to say how that will turn out. However, Microsoft was probably the first company to do this sort of thing with Outlook Web Access (OWA) for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server and, later, Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) for Exchange 2003. It shows a spectacular amount of foot-dragging that more office apps are only following a decade later.
Finally, why announce Office 2010 at a Worldwide Partner Conference? The answer is that -- unlike, say, Apple or Google -- Microsoft gets more than 95% of its revenues via its 640,000 or so business partners. These form the rich and varied ecosystem whereby millions of people earn their living by selling, installing, customising, migrating, supporting and building applications on top of Microsoft products. The accessory applications and the customisation features of Office enable it to be integrated into business processes… and hard to remove without a lot of expensive programming and retraining and, perhaps, a reduction in functionality.
The Microsoft Business Division, which includes Office, generated $19bn in revenues in fiscal 2008, while the Server and Tools division generated another $13bn. Together these represented more than half of Microsoft's revenues, and $17bn in operating profits. It's not all from Office, of course, but there's still a lot riding on Office 2010.
* Office 13 went strangely missing, but they still unveiled Office 14 on the 13th.
Microsoft has announced they will launch web versions of their popular Office software in 2010.  It will be included in all versions of Office 2010 when it ships next year.  All Windows Live customers will also reportedly have access.  Testers will be given access at the end of this year.
Microsoft Office 2007 logo
The service will go into direct competition with Google Docs, launched three years ago.  Last week Google announced they were going to launch a new operating system, called Google Chrome OS.  Like Google Docs, Microsoft Office will be compatible with Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Microsoft's group product manager for Office stated, "We believe the web has a lot to offer in terms of connectivity.  We have over a half a billion customers world-wide and what we hear from them is that they really want the power of the web without compromise. They want collaboration without compromise.  And what they tell us today is that going to the web often means they sacrifice fidelity, functionality and the quality of the content they care about. We knew that if and when we were ever going to bring applications into a web environment, we needed to do the hard work first because we hold such a high bar."

Microsoft's business software division, which includes Office, made USD 9.3 billion in profit during the first three-quarters of its 2009 fiscal year.  Analysts from ''The Wall Street Journal'' have predicted that the move "could put at risk as much as $4 billion (£2.46 billion) in revenue."