According to information on Foleys blog Steve Ballmer said during his annual Strategic Update briefing with Wall Street analysts that Office 14 won’t be shipping in 2009.

One of the reason to this would be the option to release it at the same time as SharePoint Server 14.

So what is the impact of all of this? Let’s look ahead and see what is up to be released in the upcoming year and beyond this year:

- Windows 7
- Windows Azure
- Server 2008 R2
- Office 14
- Office 14 Server / SharePoint Server 14
- Visual Studio (Dev 10)
- …

What is related and what is not. Well, if I look at the list you can divide the list into three sections:

- Operating Systems
- Applications (and Server Applications)
- Developer Tools

The first section, Operating Systems, is quite isolated from the other two. No need to release this with the other items of the list. Windows 7 appears to be close to going RTM so there is no reason to think this release will be delayed in any way and with my best guess that will be Q3 2009. There is no information to support this but if you do a little research on the internet you’ll see that the votes are all within this timeframe.

Update: A large hardware manufacturer told Bloomberg Windows 7 to be released late September, early October.

For the next two sections it’s a bit more complicated. These two will have a hard time living without each other. If you release the applications you want to develop against them and if you release developer tools you are looking for applications to target.

For this exact reason the Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 2005 Second Edition (VSTO 2005 SE) was released when Office 2007 released. This released additional features to support the Office 2007 file format and some extra features such as the Application Level Add-Ins.

With this in mind, I tend to think that Dev 10 would be scheduled to be pre-released near the end of 2009  (PDC ?) to MSDN subscribers like they did with the release of Visual Studio 2008 (released Nov. 2007) and call it Visual Studio 2010 in the line of its codename “Dev 10” and schedule the public release simultaneously with the release of Office 14 early 2010.

There are several reasons why I think this could be a proper release schedule:

- Separation of products and operating system
- Releasing products with the developer tools to support the products
- Test driving the developer tools early by a limited group MSDN subscribers
- Secure earnings over a longer period due to spreading releases

For now we only know that Steve announced Office 14 not to make it this year.

If you are in control, what would be –your– release roadmap? Let me know if my guessing here makes sense.