Microsoft makes moves toward Office 2010 announcement Monday

Rumours began flying today that Microsoft could announce the launch of its online Office 2010 suite on Monday.

The Friendfeed message, “Why did Google announce Chrome OS this week? Well, of course, Microsoft has a big announcement coming on Monday (I’m embargoed)” came just after the recent announcement of Google’s new Chrome operating system.

Discussion followed, and before long Scoble dropped a big hint “Diego, no, it’s one of Microsoft’s primary businesses. Did you know Microsoft has 14-billion-dollar businesses?” Office 2010 has been labelled version 14 of the popular software, and is a primary business.

Microsoft logo

Monday is the first day of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, and would be the perfect opportunity for such an announcement. It could also explain Google’s somewhat hurried announcement of its new OS, with the search giant hoping to take some attention away from any news from the conference.

And yesterday, Microsoft released a new trailer shown above which promotes the upcoming release of the new software, prompting further reports that we could see the launch or announcement on Monday of a “cloud based” version of the suite.

Monday could also see the announcement of the private beta testing commencement, with Microsoft already announcing it would begin sometime mid-to-late July.

TechCrunch points out that we could see the new cloud-based version (when its finally announced, it may not necessarily come on Monday) available on Office.com, which currently displays a page informing users about a transition from the previous owners.