Microsoft announced that Office 2008 for Mac will be delayed until January 2008, citing some previously unsolved bugs for the postponement and the need for further testing.

Mac fans waiting for a compatible version of Microsoft’s popular Office suite will have to wait until Macworld 2008, when the Redmond giant estimates it will be ready for prime-time.

Previously, the Redmond software behemoth had declared that Mac-Office would go on sale in the first half of 2007.

"It really is just a quality issue across the board," Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh business unit (Mac BU), said in an interview Wednesday.

But apparently it’s more than that: Eisler also blamed Apple’s shift from IBM-produced PowerPC CPUs to Intel processors, which disrupted the working process at Mac BU, and also Microsoft’s move to include a new file format in Office 2007 for PCs, released in January this year for the public.

"There was no one thing that caused the push—it was more of a perfect storm," Eisler told Ars Technica in an interview. "The switch to Intel processors, the switch to different tools in the development stream, the switch in formats with Office—all of it presented different roadblocks for the team, and we wanted to make sure we could address all of those issues."

Usually, Microsoft releases Mac versions of its Office software within 6 months from the release for the PC version, but Mac-Office 2008 would be a premiere, in the sense that almost 12 months would have passed since the debut of its PC counterpart.

Eisler promised more details as the launch date gets near, but also said that a public beta of the software is not scheduled (unlike Windows Vista or Office 2007, which have been widely available for public-beta testing since May 2006).