Windows and Office long have been Microsoft's cash cows, but each is facing its own challenges due to current market pressures.

Many business customers are still running Windows XP, opting to skip Vista in favor of upgrading to Windows 7 when it's available. Microsoft is under pressure to ensure that Windows 7 can placate those customers and prove it was worth the wait.

Office is facing pressure on the consumer front from Web-based, less expensive or free productivity applications from Google, Adobe and Zoho. On the business front, smaller companies in particular are questioning their investment in Office and eyeing these Web-based applications that make sharing documents easier and more efficient, according to a recent report by Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish.

One of the only things Microsoft has said publicly about the Office 14 release is that it will include Office Web applications -- lightweight, Web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- through its Office Live Workspace service in the same time frame as the desktop suite's release. Microsoft will test Office Web applications, an obvious response to pressure from Google Apps, later this year, it said last week at CES.

For enterprises, Microsoft has been promoting Office as the front end for a comprehensive worker collaboration and business intelligence platform that incorporates its SharePoint portal, CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications, and its SQL Server database. Office 14 is expected to extend this integration.

One way it will do that, twentysix New York's Brust said, is through technology code-named Gemini that surfaces business-analytics information from the next version of SQL Server, code-named Kilimanjaro, into Microsoft Excel. He said he expects Gemini to be "a big driver for Excel 14 in the business space."