Microsoft Might Update Office After Every Three Months

By: Zain Nabi  |   March 4th, 2013   |   News

Microsoft might update its recently launched Office 2013 after every three months, meaning four updates in a year, according to president of Microsoft Office division Kurt DelBene, who recently shared some of his plans at a technology conference hosted by Morgan Stanley.

 

DelBene said at the conference, via Computer World:

 

“We already have the mechanisms in place to update the [Office 365] service on a quarterly basis. With the client subscription…we’ll have the ability to do that with client business as well, the desktop version of Office.”

 

When Microsoft released the new Office product, the company claimed it a big success, but did not share other details including how it would upgrade the product and what would the updates contain. Now we have at least got something in that direction, but there is nothing concrete that can help us reach a sound conclusion.

 

Computer World contacted different analysts to respond to Microsoft’s plans for quarterly updates and all of them responded in a different manner. Wes Miller of Directions on Microsoft said:

 

“They have serviced the platforms within Office 365, little things here and there, and they’d like to move to a cloud cadence, if you will, [for Office 2013], too. It’s an ambition, more a goal that they’re working toward.”

 

Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner, had a different view, a bit more optimistic. He said:

 

“[DelBene] is certainly intimating more frequent releases, and I’d expect them to do that.”

There are two points that require attention here. One is if and when the software will be updated, and the other is what will the updates contain. DelBene himself said about the updates:

 

“I think it will get us to a point where we have a major-minor cadence, because there are some investments that have to happen that require a great deal of forward investment. When you’re structurally changing the underpinnings of Exchange, or SharePoint, or the Office applications, those take a while to develop. And so I think we’ll get into the short cycle where we can add more features, but then we’ll have a longer cycle where we really have to intensively change underpinnings of the services.”

 

However, there are many analysts who believe that Microsoft cannot come up with something entirely out-of-the-box as they argue that the product is very old and does not carry room for aggressive changes.