Microsoft has announced that Mac Office 2008, the Macintosh version of their incredibly popular Windows productivity suite, has gone gold, and is shipping to manufacturers. It"s been nearly half a decade since Microsoft updated the suite of applications, which consists of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage (a mail client similar to Outlook): the latest version before Office 2008 was Office 2004, which does not run natively on Intel Macs, but rather through an emulation layer to run PowerPC code.
Office 2008 contains several new features, including a new interface across all of the included applications, code that runs as a Universal Binary so it runs natively on PowerPC and Intel without the use of an emulator, and My Day, a small, widget-like application that extends Entourage.
Office 2008 will be available on January 15, 2008, for the prices of $150 for the Student and Teacher edition, $400 for the standard edition, and $500 for the Special Media edition.
(Thanks Radish™!)