Microsoft job teases Office 14 and new Office Workspaces team

I want YOU for Office 14A job posted on Microsoft Careers a few days ago for a position of “Software Development Engineer in Test” in the Office team teases with a snippet of information about plans for the next major release of Office, codenamed “Office 14“. The job description writes,

The new Office Workspaces team for Office 14 is a V1 effort chartered to excel at empowering our Information Worker customers to easily organize their documents around the projects they work on and to seamlessly collaborate with others on these documents. We will deeply integrate elegant UI into the major Office applications along with creating a new standalone interface and effective integration into the Windows shell. In addition to delivering simple document organization, we will also make document synchronization and collaborative merging an intuitive cinch.

(Followed by lists of acronyms and adjectives that make you feel somewhat incompetent)

I like the sound of seamless collaboration and elegant UI, but integration into the Windows shell smells like EU anti-trust actions. Having said that, I’m totally sold on the whole “intuitive cinch” thing. Where do I sign?

10 insightful thoughts

  1. I hope they learn the value of consistency. MS has had some terrible misfires at GUIs. There is a strong faction within that company that each application creates its own GUI elements rather than adhere to an overarching design pattern/appearance.

    The .NET evangelists that have given me presentations were ecstatic (to use the term loosely) that a winfx developer can create scrollbars with rounded or straight corners “with ease” if they did not like the vista standard. Anything else is refered to as “battleship gray” and “old school”. I couldn’t help but to think someone armed with a baseball hat needs to walk the hallways a few times out there in redmond.

    Look at the new experssion web for more divergence. Now I don’t think ribbons fall into this category (I think they should be pushed into the shell actually), but prior office versions always reinvented their own toolbars for absolutely no reason.

    -d

  2. i think mac office is on a different version scale, could be wrong, but its not like office 97 (win) vs office 98 (mac)

  3. @Matt Sharpe:
    i can’t remember exactly where i read that office version numbers alternate between windows and mac. 13 is Magnesium and 14 is er… the next windows version (what ever the code-name ends up being).

  4. I received a response from a Team member of the Office for Mac Team a few months ago that they will not be skipping the number 13 for the release following Office 2008. So only Office for Windows Team seem to be superstitious.

  5. *bump?*

    LOL. I dont want Windows anyway. xD

    @Andre Da Costa: Haha. Go Office for Mac team!

    And I’m british. I dont think Nintendo is supersTITious they released 3 NEW DS Lite colours to the UK with no delay. Strange :/

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