I think every version of MS Office has moved from being a document-related software to an application-related software, where basically documents are only a pretext, a starting point.

Office 2007, more specifically the Office 2007 platform is not just document-related software, where most think of the usual fat clients, it’s an integrated suite that tries to enable customer cases, such as sharing confidential documents behind a portal.

So “Office 2007? is actually more about business scenarios, and that includes server CALs such as sharepoint.

“Office 2009? is the next release in this regard : more integrated scenarios.

As much as there is the current debate on whether OOXML should become an international standard (of course, it should not since it’s just proprietary binary file formats surrounded by angle brackets), it misses the bigger picture. Which is how Microsoft tries to lock-in entire enterprise departments into using the integrated suites.

A ton of undocumented protocols are what makes this integrated suite possible. Microsoft has not made public that they would document these anytime soon.

During the last 15 months at work I went from Excel 97 through Excel 2002 and now Excel 2003 because the laptop I had two Decembers ago finally finished it’s leased lifetime. When I received a new laptop as replacement I got the then most up to date image that included Office XP, and last Spring the image was updated to Office 2003. Most of the canned Excel models we use are now run through Terminal Server, and those are still running Office XP (Excel 2002) with no plans to upgrade even to Office 2003 this year or next.

At home, Excel 2000 is still more than sufficient, even for working on stuff from work. And it runs not too much worse under wine under Linux than it does under Windows XP Home.

As for upgrading, I’ll wait until the ISO certification process for OOXML is finished either way. If OOXML becomes an ISO standard, that ought to be close to the SP1 release. If it doesn’t, I’ll wait for the SP after MSFT releases build-in ODF support. I’m certainly going to wait for fewer newsgroup postings about very slow file opening.

I work for a large fortune 50 technology firm and we are moving to Office 2007 at the end of Q4 2007 (all 4000+ HQ employees).

I’m actually surprised by the Office 2007 book sales. Based on sales (not scientific) I think Office 2007 will be adopted faster than anyone anticipated. My sense is that by 2008, 30%-40% of Office versions in action will be Office 2007.

Like all authors who gained 60 pounds last year, I don’t relish the idea of updating any material until 2009. So I’m going to predict that Office 14 will come around Q1 2010; even if it’s only wishful thinking.

I intend to avoid 2007 for as long as possible, and I really can’t see any of my clients or potential clients upgrading any time soon. In fact I’ve just warned one client not to upgrade as their key pricing model wont work on 2007.
As a developer having 2007 on my dev machine isn’t going to fly as it will introduce too many incompatabilities with existing projects.
So far this year I have had more Open Office projects than 2007, (and more XLM ones!).
Cheers
Simon