Microsoft To Make An Announcement Today, Signs Point to Office 15

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Today is the day that Microsoft is allegedly going to release Office 15 to the world (although most are galling it Office 2013 now). The rumors started to surface when it was announced that Microsoft would be holding an invite only press event today (July 16 2012) in San Francisco. Just like the debut of the Surface Tablet Microsoft is keeping quiet about the actual news they are going to give out at the event today so they could be announcing almost anything including their own phone, but we think that is unlikely. We know that Microsoft intends to include Office 15 with Windows RT so it is probably much more likely we are going to see something on their new productivity suite.

Still there is a lot going on over at Microsoft right now. Only last week it was confirmed that Microsoft has sold off their interest in NBC (in the form of MSNBC) to Comcast. Microsoft also announced that it was cutting positions in their advertising and marketing divisions. Considering the fact that Microsoft is not exactly cash poor we are wondering if they are making some of these moves to ensure they appear more stable or because they are gearing up for a new round of purchases (including possibly buying RIM).

From everything we are seeing Microsoft is trimming some of their excess to get prepared for a fight with the current popular devices. Our concern at this point is; will Microsoft focus on the right items and not forget the larger eco-system that put them on top in the first place. The tone of this announcement today will be a big indicator. We have already seen Microsoft backpedal on some of their more arrogant comments around the launch of Surface where some executives were caught claiming they had lost confidence in their OEM partners. Now the word at Microsoft is that Surface is a design point and not intended as a mainstream product. We expect to hear more verbiage like this in today’s announcement regardless of what it is about.

We also fully expect to see more incentives to the consumer to get them to dump whatever version of Windows they are running now and join Microsoft in The Cloud with Windows 8. We will know a lot more about what is going on sometime after 12PM Pacific time and, as always, will let you know about it as soon as we find out.

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