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.
For several product lines, including Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, Windows Intune, and Windows Server, the roadmap simply points to a "historical release cadence" spot on the calendar that will likely strike serious Microsoft watchers as pretty unsurprising.
For Windows Phone, Microsoft does offer a tantalizing tip regarding "future improvements," marked with the "general availability" icon, that are coming towards the end of 2012—though exactly what those improvements entail apparently isn't available to average Microsoft reseller partners with access to the Partner Network.
We're guessing Nokia has a good idea about what's coming.
Some other products, namely Office 365 and Lync Online, appear with strings of regular service updates coming throughout 2012 (and in the case of Office 365, into 2013), but not much else.
As to the authenticity of the roadmap, veteran Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet said Thursday that she's been able to independently verify that the slides are the real deal and part of a bigger roadmap distributed to Microsoft partners that's dated Dec. 22, 2011.
In fact, Foley offered up some extra details worth checking out about Microsoft products like Silverlight, Visual Studio, and SQL Server that she said appeared in the full roadmap.
Microsoft's official and non-committal word on the leaked slides is that the company "often provide[s] forward-looking information to our partners and customers under our confidentially agreements with them. This information contains our best estimates and is, in no way, final or definitive."
For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.
