Microsoft's task: Sorting, tossing Office features

November 10, 2013

What Microsoft puts in its upcoming touch-based Office suite will be a huge test for the company, analysts said. "There's really nothing out there in the mobile world that provides anything near the power of Office on the desktop," said Ross Rubin of Reticle Research in an interview last week. "It will be a massive challenge to preserve even the majority of that functionality." Microsoft has said it will release touch-enabled versions of the primary applications in Office—Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word—but has provided no clues of what that suite will be like. Nor has it disclosed a timetable for the touch-based suite, although rumors have pegged a ship date in the first half of 2014. "We are working on touch-first versions for our core apps in the Office suite, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and we will bring these apps to Windows devices, and also to other devices ... at a proper timetable," is the most that company executive Qi Lu, who leads the Applications and Services Group, has said publicly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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