Microsoft's Gates changes Office rules again

Gates was speaking to software developers in downtown LA. Office 12 will take advantage of the boons its future OS Vista promises. He claims that it's the biggest advance for Office in over a decade, when 12 arrives.

For starters, it's completely re-designed, and this is always a boon for training companies selling word processing and spreadsheet training. People used to the look'n'feel of Old Windows might get a bit of a shock.

He said the next design is based on "customer insight" and the way it looks will be completely different. It gets rid of "traditional" menus and toolbars with graphical command tabs.

Such tabs, said Gates, appear when customers need them and disappear when they're not relevant. Let us be the judge of that, Bill.

The new look'n'feel is was driven, he said, by the desire to help people create professional looking documents. Office 12, which may not be its final name, has graphical galleries from which people can pick and click, he said.

People, he said, respond best when they see what their final work will look like, and to tell you the truth, that's why we think the old Microsoft Write was a great, though small, application.

Office 12 will use WinFX, which Gates said is a brand new programming model for Vista to take advantage of things called the Presentation Foundation and the Communication Foundation.

Microsoft is introducing a $100 million co marketing effort for independent software vendors to push them towards Vista.

Other features of Vista include the LINQ, yeah LINQ project, which stands for the Language Integrated QUery Project, and Atlas which is Bill's code name for a web client framework for building asynchronous Javascript. So it's all change again.

Microsoft is 30 years old this year. We wish we were. Here's the Vole's taster for the future in graphical form, below. µ

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