Microsoft has announced that the upcoming update to its office suite, bringing us up to Microsoft Office 2010, has now entered the ‘released to manufacturing’ stage, which means we’re nearing a public debut.
As it stands, Office 2010 has already received a fairly widespread beta, with Microsoft allowing anyone to opt-in in a similar fashion to its open beta testing of Windows 7, which resulted in some very positive publicity indeed for the then new operating system. The positive response from beta testers of Office 2010 is something that we’ve already seen, but we’ll be curious to see if Office 2010 sees the same kind of massive push as Windows 7 did, given that a lot of Windows 7’s success has been attributed to the fairly widespread negative response to Windows Vista.
According to a posting to the Microsoft Office blog, the company saw fully 7.5 million people download the beta version, which means that it has managed to triple the number of beta testers since the last Microsoft Office release, back in 2007.
There’s also some more detail from the folks at Microsoft on just when we can expect to see the first versions of Office 2010 rolled out to ‘Volume License customers with active Software Assurance’ from April 27th. From there, it’ll be rolled out to the rest of the volume license customers, and then it’ll take a little while until it hits the rest of us at retail around May 1st.
Based on