Office 11 will only work for 2000/XP

MICROSOFT OFFICE 11 won't work on any versions of Windows other than XP or those versions of Windows 2000 that have had service pack 3 installed, we learn.
The product is in beta testing and Microsoft says that if it gets enough complaints from customers it could tweak the Office suite to run on Windows, Me, 98 or NT, but such a move is highly unlikely.

BetaNews pointed to a posting aimed at the Beta testers which said there were "a number of reasons for removing support for Windows 9x." Amongst these was the fact that "Windows 98 and 98 SE are getting a bit old now." Windows 9x is "inherently insecure," the posting, attributed to a Volish developer read.

We don't seem to remember Microsoft telling us that Windows 98 was "inherently insecure" when we bought it. We don't even remember the slogan "Start Here - for inherently insecure computing".

Still, Microsoft has done such things before. Like Office XP won't run on Windows 95, for example. And what we find most handy is that documents created in Office XP's Word just cause Word 98 to crash, with the helpful note "this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Fantastic.

The posting attributed to Microsoft said: "We understand that this decision won't be popular among all of our customers, but it allows us to create a better and more stable product." Hmmm.

Of course, it helps the Vole to get users to upgrade to the latest versions of its OS and its Office suite to get things to crash around the users' feet when they do something it doesn't like. Like trying to run new Office documents on old versions of Office. How unreasonable of us to expect compatability between products from a single company.

source the inquirer