Microsoft to launch next Office for Mac in second half of 2014

Computerworld - Microsoft today said that it would launch a new version of Office for Mac before the end of the year, but won't discuss details until the second half of 2014.

In an interview with Computerwoche -- literally, "Computerweek" -- a Microsoft Germany official said that Office for Mac had been delayed because the development team, dubbed the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU), had been folded into the larger Microsoft Business Unit (MBU), the division responsible for Office on Windows, in the first quarter of 2011.

Thorsten Hübschen, business group lead for Microsoft Office in Germany, spoke to Computerwoche -- like Computerworld owned by IDG -- at CeBit 2014, the massive computer trade show running this week in Hanover, Germany.

Hübschen said Microsoft would reveal more information about Office for Mac in the second half of this year.

The next Office for Mac is already late by past Microsoft practice. The average timespan between Office for Mac editions -- going back as far as Office v. X -- has been 1,088 days. But as of today, it has been 1,232 days since the launch of Office for Mac 2011.

Historically, Microsoft has hewn to a three-year development cycle for both Office on the Mac and the far-more-popular Office suite for Windows, with a new version of the former following the newest of the latter by several months at a minimum.

Office for Mac 2011, for instance, followed Office 2010 on Windows by 134 days, or just over four months. Office for Mac 2008, however, came 351 days, or nearly a year, after the debut of its Windows sibling, Office 2007. But even the longer lag time of the latter has been exceeded: Office 2013 for Windows launched Jan. 29, 2013, 406 days ago.

It's likely that the next Office for Apple's OS X will be titled "Office for Mac 2015," as Microsoft typically slaps the next year's date on an Office edition that launches in the second half of a calendar year.

If Microsoft waits until later this year to ship Office for Mac 2015, it will be cutting it close: The Redmond, Wash., company supports Mac editions of Office for just five years, half the support lifecycle of the Windows' suite, and Office for Mac 2011's retirement date is set for Jan. 12, 2016. Customers may have little more than a year to migrate to the newest edition before Microsoft stops patching Office for Mac 2011.

Microsoft also shuttered the Mac Office-specific blog it maintained for years at the site where it touts and sells the productivity suite. "As of today, no new posts will appear," the blog stated Monday. Future posts will be published on the more inclusive Office Blogs website, where Office on Windows and Office 365 dominate.

The MacBU blog shutdown was part of a January refresh of all Microsoft's blogs that focused on Office topics, a company spokeswoman said.

Microsoft neither confirmed nor denied Hübschen's comments on Office for Mac release timing. "The team is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac," the spokeswoman said in an emailed reply to questions.

This article, Microsoft to launch next Office for Mac in second half of 2014, was originally published at Computerworld.com.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

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LMU Conference Serves as Launch Pad for Intellectual Virtues Charter School

Top scholars in education, philosophy and psychology gathered at Loyola Marymount University for a first-of-its-kind conference on the importance of teaching intellectual character and intellectual virtues in schools.

The conference was the brainchild of Jason Baehr, a professor in the Philosophy Department of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts.  Baehr received a $1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation last year to develop a curriculum and a charter school to be used as models for educating children in intellectual virtues.

Intellectual virtues are the character traits of a good thinker or learner. They include curiosity, open-mindedness, attentiveness, creativity, intellectual humility and intellectual perseverance.

Baehr opened the two-day conference by telling the more than 120 participants that the purpose of the event was “to expand knowledge behind the theory and practice of intellectual virtues in education.”  

Internationally known scholars discussed and debated intellectual virtues, why they are important to education, and what it looks like in the classroom when you educate to encourage these traits.

Ian McCurry, an English teacher at the Opportunities Unlimited Charter High School in Los Angeles who has been training with Baehr’s team, demonstrated how he focuses on intellectual virtues in his teaching. He’s reorganized his class, giving students assigned roles in discussion groups and letting students evaluate each other on their participation and responsiveness.  

McCurry told the group that when he started training in intellectual virtue techniques, “I was teetering on the edge of burnout with teaching and wasn’t getting through to my students.” The training has “helped renew my love of teaching and helped me make some of my students more engaged in the learning process.”

Scott Crass, a math professor at California State University, Long Beach, demonstrated an intellectual virtues geometry class where he used plastic toys to show how angles create spherical shapes; then he described how to involve students in activities to help them observe and assess what they’ve seen.

“It produces a deeper understanding of mathematics,” Crass told the group. “Math is exploration. If you are not exploring, you’re not doing mathematics.”

Using many of the techniques demonstrated and debated at the conference, Baehr and his team will launch the Intellectual Virtues Academy charter school in the Bixby Knolls area of Long Beach this fall, with two sixth-grade classes of about 25 students each.  

School organizers have hired a principal and are in the process of hiring two teachers and finalizing the curriculum. The school will have its first parent/teacher meeting in the next few weeks. Organizers hope to add seventh- and eighth-grade classes over the next two years.

For more information on the Intellectual Virtues and Education Project at LMU go to http://intellectualvirtues.org/.

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