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I’ve received a few emails from people who recall the previous version of Office carrying a code name of “Office 12.” Their inquiries ring through a resounding, “what the heck happened to “Office 13?” Though this issue has been addressed within a few of the Microsoft communities ever since we first found out there would be no “Office 13,” I’ll go ahead and echo the core fact of the matter: Superstition, Watson! Ho ho!

Yes, it seems the folks who coin the code names on the Office team at Microsoft decided that 13 was indeed an unlucky number, but this comes as no surprise seeing it as Friday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky and many 13+ story buildings either have a 12a designation or they do as Microsoft has done with Office and skip to 14. It’s all just cutsy little semantics and doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of what the product will actually be, so don’t freak out simply because someone at Microsoft has a sense of numerologically impending doom. lol.

Psst! Hey, Microsoft: “…the number 13 isn’t any more unlucky than any other number. There exist negative and positive, and balanced, over-balanced, and under-balanced qualities for every number.” That’s straight from a numerology “expert.” Personally, I don’t subscribe to any superstitious dogmas but if you want to see just what they’re buying into, go here.

And if you happen to wonder if this is all indeed why they skipped “Office 13″ for a code name, nothing’s better than a document straight from Microsoft’s servers showing as such. Here, Eric Vigesaa, the 2006-? Program Manager for Office System client applications, is having a discussion with TechNet and says the following on 12/27/2006:

“Eric: I actually am taking a vacation for two weeks and then, it may sound strange but the next version of Office is already in the planning stages, we want to make sure that our IT perspective and apps are represented in the new product focus and offerings so we’re going to be very involved with that.

Michael: So that’s Office 13 in development huh?

Eric: Well, 13 is unlucky so we’re calling it Office 14.“

Source: TechNet Radio 12/27/2006 Transcript

Oddly enough, even folks within Microsoft prior to then were assuming the natural progression from “Office 12″ to “Office 13.” Again, residing on Microsoft’s servers, are a couple of documents containing the same information from 2005 referencing the development of “”Office 13″ prototypes”:

Source 1: Dik_Bigl.pdf

Source 2: ServiceorientatieEnICT.pdf

Both of those documents are in Dutch, but with a quick Babel Fish translation comes a loose interpretation of what we can easily gather to be the information we’re interested in in regards to “Office 13:”

“With which (version of) product Microsoft comes also on the market, there is always a remake in frequently make and is thus still worked to the prototypes of a still remake. To give an example: Office 2003 are in 2005, the current version of Office and have the internal version number 11. For Office 12 for the `Longhorn wave’ and is now already researchers there it is at present worked busy with considering and developing prototypes for Office 13. Thus continues invest Microsoft in the future.”

All in all, this is a pretty frivolous effort in research but hopefully this will provide the be all and end all of this topic. Personally, I think Microsoft should’ve just replaced the 1 with a <, thus ending up with Office <3 annnnnd that's why I'm a freelance journalist and not on Microsoft's marketing team. lol.

-Stephen

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