Surviving your first hour with Office 2013

Windows Secrets Newsletter Top Story.

This week’s newsletter includes more details about the KB 2670838 silliness and — this one’s important — an announcement about the beginning of an online, frequently updated list of patches that Susan Bradley evaluates for reliability.

Susan’s Master Patch Watch chart is only available to Windows Secrets Newsletter subscribers, but if you try to keep track of patches by KB number, it’s an absolutely indispensable resource. (Besides, subscribing to WSN is cheap and easy – you get to decide how much you want to spend for the subscription.)

Can Microsoft get SaaS right with Office 2013?

For rent: Office 2013.

Any interest?

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

The Office 15 crystal ball just got murkier

Microsoft’s been teasing Office 15 for some months now, with occasional fleeting flashes during Windows 8 demos. Some lucky journalists who attended the Windows Surface announcement two weeks ago in Los Angeles had a chance to actually use the new Office on a Windows RT Surface machine – albeit for just a few minutes.

Shortly after the Surface announcement, I posted an analysis of What we don’t know about Microsoft Surface. Although much remains unanswered about the two Surface tablets, one small detail about Office 2013 slipped. As I described in that blog, Microsoft posted an official “Video Gallery” about the Surface tablets, which included an interesting revelation, in small print, down at the bottom of the page. It said that the Windows RT Surface “ships with Office Home & Student 2013 RT Preview.”

It’s hard to read much into that name, but at least superficially it would appear that there’s a different version of Office for Windows RT as opposed to Windows 8. It would also appear that there’s a Home & Student version of the new Office, and that Microsoft is planning on shipping Windows RT Surface tablets with a “Preview” of that version. Whatever that means.

I dropped by the same site a couple of hours ago, and ventured down to the bottom of the page again.

Now, the same page, in the same place, says, “Surface for Windows RT includes Office 15 Apps.”

That’s a considerable backtrack from what was originally announced. I wonder what it signifies?