PCMag.Com - Leaked Microsoft product roadmap slides suggests that the software giant plans to release Internet Explorer 10 sometime in the middle of this year, that beta versions of the next iterations of Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Visio will arrive in the same timeframe with official releases due out in early 2013, and that whatever happens next with Windows Phone is anybody’s guess.
The roadmap slides (below) were posted on Twitter on Thursday by one Maarten Visser, the chief executive of an IT solution provider called Meetroo which works with SharePoint and other cloud products. Visser said he cadged the files from the Microsoft Partner Network, claiming he didn’t require a logon to access them (he also didn’t provide a clear path to the slides in question—PCMag poked around the site for a bit and couldn’t locate them).
If accurate, the slides present some interesting information about a handful of major product lines but are pretty sparse in their details about several others. The target timeframe for the release of IE 10 is probably the most noteworthy takeaway, while an almost total lack of new information about Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system is the most frustrating.
With regards to Microsoft’s Windows client plans, the roadmap actually contains less information than we already know—it doesn’t even refer to the February release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, for example—though it does point to an end-of-service date for Windows XP in what looks to be the second quarter of 2014. More
