Just recently, an anonymous source within Microsoft's corporation network revealed the official name for the company's upcoming Office suite. Unsurprisingly, it will be known as Microsoft Office 2010.

There's an interesting explanation behind the reason why Microsoft chose to jump from the 'Office 12' codename in Office 2007 to 'Office 14' in the 2010 release. Logically, the next release should have been labeled 'Office 13,' but Microsoft chose to skip over the number because of its negative and phobic connotations in modern culture. "[13] is an unlucky number so we're going to skip Office 13 and call the next one Office 14" says Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager for Microsoft's Office User Experience Team and the man behind the radical ribbon interface of Office 2007.

Fears aside, Microsoft Office 2010 is planned to be offered in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. However, there is no confirmation whether or not the discs will be offered as separate retail packages or bundled conveniently in a single box.

Retail availability of the upcoming suite has been a point of discussion for the past few months. A few weeks ago, we noted that Microsoft's updated 2010 Technical Adoption Program schedule states that the planned launch of 'Office 14' RTM is scheduled for early March 2010. If the company's RTM plan does not change, we can probably expect retail product availability on store shelves around April 2010.

In the meantime, here is an updated splash screen of Microsoft Word 2010 beta from a recent build: