So the word doing the rounds is that Office 2010 will launch in June 2010. There are two immediate observations that can be made about this. Either Microsoft expects to be finished early, and June is a convenient marker for all the marketing activity to start. Or it will ship in June almost irrespective of the quality of the code.

Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. So many thousands of people inside the company are working towards this launch, and it’s not only the desktop application coders and testers – Office 2010 reaches into all areas of Microsoft’s server and cloud technology.

And whilst it would be very nice indeed to work to a quality criteria, whereby it has to be of an agreed high quality with only a few nasty issues outstanding that can wait for Windows Update, that simply isn’t realistic for a team this big. Microsoft has to aim for a date, come what may. The only reason to blow such a date and take a few extra months is if there is a truly ghastly set of bugs that cant be removed in time.

We could, of course, pontificate loud and long about the advisability of putting together such a huge intermeshed software package and hoping to ship it both on time and to a high quality.