Re:Office 2013: Just what on earth has the Office team been ...
by randomfool on Wednesday January 30, 2013 @11:43PM
(#5143488)
Shipping WinRT support for all of Office within a year sounds aggressive if it was only OneNote at the end of Office 2013!
The decision to cut Metro support was made in Q1 2011 and distributed to all Office managers by Kurt himself. The team that was working on Metro (called Modern Office eXperience, MOX) shrunk and merged with OneNote. Hence, why we see OneNote has Metro and no other app does. The reasoning was "the Win8 APIs are not stable enough for us to finish on schedule with the team we have. We either ship 10/11/12 or slip by a year to support Windows 8." They decided to ship (RTM) on 10/11/12. We should see a 'surprise' SP1 that supports Metro and iOS by the end of this year (this is pure speculation from me -- I have no NDA knowledge about plans past 10/11/12).
You are seeing a classical "ship the orgchart" dilema from Microsoft with Office and Windows this season. It's sad, really, but these tensions are why I don't work there.