Word 2010 – Framing the Release

Hi, my name is Scott Stiles and I run the Program Management team for Word. The goal of this post is to provide some context regarding how we framed this release.

As I've been largely behind the scenes in the context of this blog, I thought a quick introduction was in order.

I've been with Microsoft for a total of just under 19 years on many different teams and in many different capacities. My first job at Microsoft (an internship during my senior year at college) happened to be in "product support", supporting all of our DOS apps – a list that included DOS Word 5.0 and 5.5. This job ignited my passion for Word. I'd been using MultiMate in college prior to the internship, but returned to college a huge Word fan, offering to tutor anyone who'd listen. I even built a small business for a while writing Word document-processing macros.

Throughout my career at Microsoft, "authoring" apps (across client, web and mobile) have been a common thread, and I've never been far from Word. I was excited to join the Word product team about 3yrs ago as we ramped up planning for Word 2010. I continue to be amazed by how far the product has come since my first deep immersion back in 1990.

OK, back to the product…

By now you've seen Jon's introductory post, giving you a high level taste of the features we're delivering in Word 2010. I hope the post piqued your interest; we're enjoying the process of bringing the features to life, and are looking forward to finally getting the product into the hands of our users. There's far more content to come in future posts, as we talk in much more detail about what we're delivering in the client as well as on the web and your mobile phone. We'll tune the future posts based on what we hear in the comments, so keep them coming.

Building-in quality

One of the common themes in the comments on Jon's post that struck me was "I see you're adding a bunch of new features – what about fixing the bugs I'm running into?" In hopes of addressing this, I thought I'd take a step back and talk briefly about how we address user feedback as part of building and shipping a new version of the product.

As we approach the release of each version of Word (or Office for that matter), a chunk of the team is already hard at work planning the next version.

This planning has many inputs, including market analysis, competitive trends, customer requests, MVP and Partner input, and a deep study of the issues users are having with the products we've shipped. We take customer feedback very seriously, and endeavor to fix as many of the known issues as we can in the next release. So, the key point here is that we work hard to fix existing issues as we build every release.

With the Word 2010 project, we went a step further than we have in past releases in this regard and did two things at the outset: we set aside specific development budget to address known issues, and we built one of our 3 release pillars around "polishing existing experiences" in the app.

Framing the release

In the simplest terms, here's our philosophy behind our investments in Word 2010:

1. We will add a few deep, meaningful features to the product that will truly affect the way people work, and
2. We will spend a significant amount of time and resources polishing the existing features and related scenarios delivered in previous versions.

While we haven't shipped yet, I believe we're well on our way towards delivering on both of the above goals.

To expand on this, I like to think of the work we're doing for Word 2010 in the context of the 3 "pillars" that we defined before writing the first line of code 2.5 years ago. These pillars have guided the decisions we've made at every step of the release. They are:

• Word Power in New Contexts – While the PC is still at the core of "productivity", there's no denying that people are leveraging computing power in ever expanding ways. In light of this, we've spent a significant amount of time in this release bringing key pieces of Word functionality to new "contexts" such as Server, 64bit, Mobile and the Web.
  • Word Web App – the story for this is beginning to unfold on our Web App blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/ ), but you should expect to hear about the Word Web App in more detail on this blog as well. We believe the Word Web App will be a powerful addition to the Word family -- adding amazing "reach" to the way people work with documents.
  • Server – In support of viewing in the Web App, and a few key standalone "server" scenarios, we've built a version of Word tuned for the server. More on this later as we're able.
  • Open XML SDK 2.0 (more info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/ ) – This SDK opens up a powerful new set of document processing scenarios for our users – especially when combined with Word on the server.
  • Mobile – We've made significant improvement in how users are able to leverage Word on Mobile devices.
  • 64 Bit version of Word, optimized for 64bit OS'.
• Cutting edge authoring – We picked a handful of deep features that we felt would raise the bar in terms of the core authoring experience for all of our users.
  • Co-Authoring – With Word 2010 users will be able to write documents collaboratively, without having to worry if someone else already has the document open.
  • Enhanced graphics. Improved editing and effects on photos, shapes, Smart Art, etc.
  • Enhanced text, with graphical text effects, and enhanced typography through OpenType (ligatures, kerning metrics, stylistic sets, etc.).
• Polished user experiences -- As I noted above, we've invested deeply in polishing existing scenarios in this release. Our goal here is to meaningfully improve the overall experience of using the application when compared to previous releases. I've called out three specific examples in the bullets below, but this is just a small sampling of the work we've done to improve basic usage.
  • Improved Navigation Pane, integrating Find with the Document Map. We've built an integrated experience around document navigation and organization that I think our users are going to love.
  • Improved object anchoring. Listed as an example of the type of work we've done to address user feedback – we've done work in Word 2010 to expose how and where objects are anchored in the document.
  • Microsoft Office Backstage ( http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/ ) – one of the key improvements to the overall Office user experience, available in Word 2010.
  • And many, many detailed improvements to basic usage scenarios

As important as describing what the release is intended to be, is describing what it isn't. In contrast with some previous releases, as a rule we haven't invested deeply in a particular customer segment in 2010. This doesn't mean there aren't a few careful exceptions to the rule, but I think it's worth stating the rule to help frame the release. This release also isn't about having the longest possible list of new features on the "back of the box". Think "quality and depth" over "quantity".

As Jon noted in our previous post, we'll have a regular stream of posts over the next year delving into increasing levels of detail on Word 2010. Again, your comments will help us tune the blog plan.

On behalf of the Word team, I want to thank the readers for their continued interest in and passion regarding Word. We look forward to your comments, and to sharing more about the release in the weeks to come.

Scott Stiles, Group Program Manager, Word.