Microsoft Office 2010 draws near – Clippy buried for good
After the Windows operating system and the Internet Explorer Web browser, the Microsoft product most people are aware of is Office. Office 2010 is now drawing nearer, with details of the beta version and the new Office Web Applications expected to be announced next week. Thankfully, Clippy appears to be absent from both.
Microsoft began marketing the forthcoming Office 2010 earlier this year but little actual detail has been revealed about the product. There have been some screenshots leaked and an early build of the software suite even leaked onto the Internet.
Now, it looks likely that Microsoft will unveil an Office 2010 beta to a private group at the company’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on Monday. In preparation for this, the company posted the latest Web advert for the product , which positions Office 2010 as an all-action movie.
The marketing campaign sees Microsoft Office 2010 set up as a Michael Bay-style movie of epic proportions. We get to see the death of Clippy, the Office Assistant who annoyed everyone he haunted for years before Microsoft finally put him out of his misery (and ours) in 2004. It’s a bizarre concept but it does kind of work, and it certainly shows the creative juices are still flowing at Microsoft. We’ll just forget about that Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld business.
The big news about Office 2010 is its supposed integration with cloud software, which means Word, Excel and the rest will be based on the Web rather than the desktop. Office Web will be Microsoft’s effort to counter the attack made on it with Google Docs. The move to the cloud was first announced at the Professional Developers Conference back in October 2008 but only now looks likely to get a public (private) airing.
Also worth noting is the fact that the Office.com domain seems to be in a transition stage of changing owners. The chances are high that Microsoft decided to buy the domain in order to have an easily-remembered site to house the Web side of Office 2010.
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