Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP, Office, Microsoft

Steven came in to talk about Office 12, the new version of Office set to be released the end of next year. He started off by talking about the development process at Microsoft, then the evolution of Office, and finally a demo of Office 12.

I have been skeptical of Office 12 (and Vista for that matter). Office 2003 isn't perfect by any means, but even for a power user like me, I don't find much lacking. I could tell Steven is concerned about this as well even though he didn't openly say it. He started off his talk by asking if anyone thought Office was perfect and had no room to improve. Of course no one raised their hand, including me. But that misses the point. It isn't that Office 2003 is perfect, but is it "good enough." I'm sure Microsoft can continue to innovate on Office -- it is in their business interest to do so. But that doesn't mean at some point the product will be good enough to meet the majority of users' needs. I think they are getting very close.

However, after the demo, I was pretty impressed with the new UI. They are getting rid of menus in place of "ribbons." They've also added a few neat features in Excel and Word that he showed us. Maybe they can convince me that Office 12 will be worth the upgrade (especially since I get the software for free), but this will be the first time that I've actively thought about not bothering.

Steven's bio

Steven's blog

Notes:

Making Office is like ordering pizza for 400 million people

1/3 of their energy is focused on talking to customers

50 million people visit Office's website (20 languages). Based on that he could IPO the site

30 million lines of code in Office Pro

100 spoken languages

$11 billion in revenue and 400 million customers

700 programmers, 2500 total people

Showed screenshots of various old Word versions

Talked about the evolution of the Word UI

For some features they did lots of research and user testing which came back positive, but found after extended use they didn't work well

Office 2003 UI has been stretched to the limit

Analyzed 1.2 billion user data sessions and created a "heat map" of most common commands

Want to get rid of "auto" features to make the software more predictable