Microsoft delays Office 2007 again:
Microsoft said Thursday that it is making another slight delay to the planned arrival time for Office 2007, citing performance concerns with recent test versions.
The software maker now plans to finish the code for the revamped Office suite by the end of the year, with a mainstream launch in “early 2007.”
“Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007,” a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. “Feedback on quality and performance will ultimately determine the exact dates.”
And, of course, this means that Windows Vista is probably going to slip as well. Because Office is the one that’s in good shape.
Ship it when it’s ready, not a day earlier. It’s good to see that Microsoft would rather risk some embarrassment than hit the deadlines regardless of the product’s quality.
Ed Bott 
I’m sorry, but I can’t quite hear it from here. Louder, please.
Tip on estimates: Take the amount of time you think it will take you and double it. Then you’re close. If you work at Microsoft, quadruple it. At least.
Carl, At the cell phone manufacturer I worked at, we had a saying for estimates: Double it and then change the time period up one unit. So if an engineer said 2 weeks, it’d really be 4 months.
Knox: I like that one even better than mine. Definitely funnier.
I’m honestly kind of surprised, because (like a lot of people) I’ve been running the Office 2007 beta stuff on my desktop for a bit now — and while it’s unacceptably buggy for production code, it’s hardly the crazy mess I would expect it to be for them to need six more months of work on it…