Whether you love it or hate it, the majority of the world’s corporations depend on Microsoft’s Office software suite. Whether it is typing something up on Word or compiling data in Excel, many of us use a version of Office every day.
Microsoft’s latest version, Office 2010, is supposed to be released in June. There are six different editions, all of which will come in 64-bit versions for the first time. There will also be a limited free edition that will be supported by ads. Retail pricing will be similar to that of older versions of Office.
Office 2010 hit the Open Beta stage in November, with thousands of eager users downloading the 684MB software package. Microsoft has now moved on to the Release Candidate stage, but is deploying this initial version to a select few.
DailyTech received confirmation via Microsoft’s PR agency: “Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft’s planned milestones in the engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly”.
It appears likely that there may be another Release Candidate version for the public at a later time. Corporate adoption of Office 2010 is expected to be slow as Microsoft becomes a victim of its own success. Many users are happy with Office 2007, and mass deployments of Office 2010 are likely to be 64-bit editions rolling out with 64-bit editions of Windows 7 at the same time.
