Microsoft News Tracker

With Microsoft sitting on its one year Xbox 360 lead as the November launches of the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii rapidly approach, the speculation is mounting on how the battle of the game console titans will turn out. Yes, GameStop sold out its pre-order quota of PS3s in one day, but that’s only to be expected and purely anecdotal.

To bring a little science to the question, a consumer research firm has been surveying US consumers on the desirability of consoles from the competing players and the results put the PS3 way ahead as John Gudiosi reports at Next Generation:

According to the study by Los Angeles based Interpret, 8.9 million U.S consumers ‘are prepared’ to pay full price ($500 or $600) for the PlayStation 3 this fall, compared to 5.7 million consumers who are willing to buy Wii at $250 and just 800,000 people who are willing to pay full price for Xbox 360 ($300 to $400).

This research, released first to Next Generation, was derived from a sample of 2,000 interviews Interpret conducted online, weighted to 2004 Census data of 13 to 54 year-olds in the U.S. Researchers ran a parallel random digit dial telephone study as a back-up to weigh the data to what the US population looks like to ensure that the online data was not over-representing females, which often occurs with online surveys.

The numbers skew high in general (it will be 2008 before PS3 has an installed base of over 12 million in the US) but what’s interesting is the ratios, and the clear brand presence owned by Sony. Xbox 360 has enjoyed tremendous success in the past year, unopposed by competitors, but the real test will come when it is up against PS3, and is attempting to break into mainstream demographics. If these numbers are true, it has a tough time ahead.

There’s more by following the link including the role of the low priced Wii as a spoiler, but based on this kind of consumer brand perception it looks like the high end game console battle is Sony’s to lose.

We’ve already heard about Vista and Internet Explorer 7 staying on their current schedule and being nearly ready for release. Now comes word that Office 2007 is just about there too:

Microsoft will close down beta testing of Office 2007 in two weeks and send the code to manufacturing by the end of October.

On Oct. 25, Microsoft will close the Office Preview Web site and remove the beta from its download servers. The Office 2007 beta has been available to public testers since May.

…

With no additional builds planned, Microsoft said it would release the suite to manufacturing — what the Redmond, Wash. developer dubs “RTM” — “in a few weeks” according to e-mail sent to testers. On Tuesday, a company spokesperson declined to specify the exact date, saying only that “we are on track to have Office in the hands of business customers by the end of this calendar year.”

Microsoft Office for the Mac always lags the Windows version, but there were rumors this week that there would be additional delay for Office 2007.  The rumor is refuted at Microsoft’s Office for Mac Team Blog:

Over the last few days, some Mac sites have been reporting that the Universal Binary version of Office for Mac (officially unnamed, but currently code-named Office 12) has been delayed, but there is no delay or deviation from our development schedule. We’re hitting our milestones, checking in our features, and making the move to Intel as planned. We’ve totally moved from Code Warrior to Xcode, so we’ve crested that hill. We usually ship 6 - 8 months after the availability of Office for Windows so we can do compatibility testing. This has been our shipping cycle for ages, and we’re right on track.

Google just launched the latest iteration in their free online office offerings called Docs & Spreadsheets. Separately they already had the Writely word processor (relaunched in August) and were testing Google Spreadsheets, but now they have combined them (dropping the Writely name) and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch got a sneak preview:

It integrates the previously separate Writely and Spreadsheet product silos into a single control panel and admin area (the previous sites for those products redirect to docs.google). This is not a deep product integration, but it is another shot across the bow of Microsoft Office. I had an unexpected opportunity to meet the team and take a look at the product earlier today along with a few other bloggers.

The new site shows all of a user’s writely and spreadsheet documents in a single list, but integration goes no further for now. The interfaces and features of the two products have also been mostly mirrored to provide a consistent user experience. For example, chat previously available only on the spreadsheet product, is now available when working on a writely document as well.

Notably absent is the ability to embed spreadsheets directly into writely documents, a feature already offered by Zoho, which has been furiously updating its own office suite (Google says this feature is coming).

The Zoho links are worth noting since there are other players in the online office game. Yesterday we saw that Steve Ballmer’s biggest concern about the Google YouTube acquisition seemed to be that it would help to subsidize free online office software and while Microsoft may trot out free online Microsoft Works to play too, either option cuts into the lucrative Microsoft Office revenue. Yes, there are functionality limitations in all the online offerings compared to full boat Microsoft Office, but as always the question is how much function the bulk of the users really need, plus the attraction of the online offerings’ trump card and possible danger point: the ease of sharing.