Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac gets undressed
We've just scored some of the first shots of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, and while they are said to be very early, you can clearly see the progress that has been made in the transition to native Cocoa applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft committed in August 2009 to shipping the next Mac Office in late 2010, with Outlook returning to replace Entourage (a late-2010 release with Outlook). The suite had already been leaking in pieces: back in January 2009 the first Office 14 screenshots surfaced (the first Office 14 screenshots), so today's Boy Genius Report shots are the second public look at the codebase.
What makes this round notable is what it documents rather than any single feature: the interface shown is an early build of the move from the old Carbon-era codebase to native Cocoa applications, which is the technical foundation the entire late-2010 promise rests on.
First-order effects
- Mac users and enterprise testers evaluating the upgrade get their first concrete evidence that the Cocoa rewrite is real and progressing, not just promised.
- The leak hands reviewers and bloggers a baseline to measure every subsequent build against, tightening scrutiny on whether Microsoft hits its stated late-2010 ship window.
Second-order effects
- Entourage users weighing whether Outlook's return justifies upgrading now have visual grounds to judge how much of the Windows experience Microsoft is carrying over, sharpening comparisons with Apple's iWork as the release approaches.
- A native-Cocoa Office raises the bar for other major Mac applications still running older frameworks, since buyers will increasingly expect the platform's flagship suite to behave like a modern OS X citizen.
Third-order effects
- If the Cocoa transition holds through shipping, Office for Mac moves structurally from a periodically updated port toward sustained co-development with the Windows version, making the Mac a first-class platform for the suite rather than an afterthought.
The trend: Office for Mac is shifting from a legacy Carbon port to a native Cocoa application developed in step with its Windows counterpart, with the late-2010 release as the proving point.