Could we see Microsoft update Office 2013 every three months?

In late January, Microsoft launched the new client-side Office 2013 in several different versions, alongside the launch of the cloud-based Office 365 Home Premium subscription service. This week, Microsoft launched new business versions of Office 365 for small, medium and large companies.

Now there are hints that Microsoft might make incremental updates to both Office 365 and the client-based Office 2013 software every three months or so. The hints come from Kurt DelBene, President of the Microsoft Office division, in statements made earlier this week at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

In the official transcript of the Q&A, linked on Microsoft's Investor website and hosted by SkyDrive, DelBene states:

We have already gotten Office 365 to the point where we're at a quarterly release cadence. And so we already have the mechanisms in place to update the service on a quarterly basis. With the client subscription, as I mentioned, we'll have the ability to do that with client business as well, the desktop version of Office.

He later added that Microsoft could update Office in the  " .... short cycle where we can add more features, but then we'll have a longer cycle where we really have to intensively change underpinnings of the services." That would seem to hint that any updates that might happen in three months would be minor feature additions, with Microsoft only making major changes to Office every few years, as they have with previous versions of the software.

Microsoft is already highly rumored to be planning for a relatively large feature update to Windows 8 later this year, under the code name Windows Blue, which could be the first of yearly updates of this type. It's more than possible that Office 2013 could receive similar incremental updates.

Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft