Techmemeorandum notes that Office is going to be late, just like Vista (pushed into 2007). This is why I thought that the anti-trust suits against Microsoft were a waste of time; the company has spent the last decade on a dubious over-coupling mission they call integration. The upshot is this - virtually every one of their mainstream products are now mutually dependent, in ways that make timely delivery difficult to achieve.

When IT shops end up in this place, they typically start over, placing the existing code into a maintenance mode. Microsoft's options are a lot more limited; they have an enormous customer base that is dependent on backwards compatibility. If they broke that for the sake of a more maintainable future codebase, they would simply be giving people a reason to seriously look at the Mac platform.