Home Live Blog: Microsoft Office 2010 – A Discussion With Executive Management

Live Blog: Microsoft Office 2010 – A Discussion With Executive Management

We are at the Microsoft campus in Seattle today for a Future of Productivity Council event.

We are hearing from Kurt DelBene, president of the Microsoft office team. We’ll be looking for how the team sees Office fitting with the cloud and Web apps.

DelBene is presenting some of the numbers:

  • Microsoft Office 2010 is now the fastest selling version of Office in history.
  • More than 30 million people use the Office Web application.
  • More tham 100 million SharePoint licenses sold to more than 17,000 customers.
  • 73% of enterprises in the United States currently use Exchange as primary email system.

DelBene says the the company is still up in the air about if people are happy to go Twitter or Facebook or if people want a combined experience.

Office 365 is in limited beta. It is on track to launch later this year.

3:40 p.m.: delBene says the company is focused on using the Web to optimize its apps for the iPad.

3:42 p.m.: In a Microsoft context, opening attachements are how most web applications are used. Anywhere access to content is the future, though. But for now the numbers show that people use apps for opening attachments.

3:47: The cloud is the megatrend affecting how people work:

  • By 2016, 43% of information workers in the United States will telecommute.
  • In 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size of what it was in 2006.
  • Social networks and blogs now account for more than 20% of time spent online.

3:57 p.m.: Microsoft is trying to make data a more natural part of work. Goal is to make data visualizations easy for anyone to create. But there is lots to learn about what people want with data. As Office 365 goes to market it will be interesting to see what features people use. In first round, they are seeing people want statistics about email flow and other usages for the services offered about the platform.

4:02 p.m.: Power Point was surprise feature of the new release for Microsoft Office 2010. People like the broadcast feature and syncing capabilities for people to share presentations. It’s another example for how the cloud is used and the importance of the Web applications for the company.They see multiple uses for Web apps being used as a platform.

4:04 p.m.: People like the ability of using the Web to access Office 365 instead of dialing into a corporate server.

4:15 p.m. Mary Jo Foley is asking about the next version of Microsoft Office. What are executives thinking? Will it be Microsoft Office 2015 or she joked, will it be Microsoft Next? DelBene mentioned 2015 without much detail beyond that.

4:25 p.m. Very minor developments are made to BPOS every 90 days.The more major releases happens every few years. Shipping according to that frequency is done because that is what the customers want. Cadence is adjusted to how people want the updates.

4:31 p.m.: The cloud is interesting to all of Microsoft’s customers. Every ounce of functionality will be in the cloud. Mail will go first and other apps will follow. More customers are choosing Microsoft and are going to the cloud on their terms. In the nine month discussion of engagement, customers will find they are not ready but they want to reserve the right to go to the cloud on their own terms. Starbucks runs Exchange on premise. They did ship 7,000 laptops to stores.Those laptop are used with cloud-based services.

That’s it! Have a great weekend!

Travel and hotel expenses were covered for Alex Williams to attend Microsoft’s Future of Productivity event.

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