Aren't the holiday seasons over? Is this some sort of New Years resolution that Microsoft Corp. has decided to induce on itself? It's been announced on Tuesday that Microsoft will keep developing and selling its Office suite for Macintoshes for at least five more years. During San Francisco's MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs gave way to some Microsoft Mac BU (Macintosh Business Unit) execs who properly went over the deal.

Roz Ho, general manager of the Mac Business Unit added, "This official commitment should leave no doubt in your mind that we're here to stay, and we're in it for the long term."

Tom Gibbons, vice president of the consumer productivity business group at Microsoft, said in a statement, "Microsoft has a history of successful collaboration with Apple, and this agreement underscores our commitment to the Mac platform…We've had many years of success with Office for Mac, and this formal commitment confirms that we're in the Mac business for the long haul."

One might wonder why Microsoft, a longtime rival of Apple has agreed to the deal. It's also lesser known that outside the Apple, Microsoft's Mac BU is the largest Mac software development group. It has 180 people working on the software mostly based in Redmond and overall, Microsoft has been developing software for Macs for over 20 years.

Microsoft also announced that it plans on creating "universal binaries" for Office Mac. This would make the new Office Suite for Mac run as well on the new Intel-based Macs as the older PowerPC architecture. Until the new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage are reprogrammed to run on the new Intel-based Macs, users will have to run the suite using the new machines' Rosetta emulation.

There hasn't been a set schedule for the next release of the software, but Microsoft has a tradition of a two-three year cycle development. Yet, we shouldn't be so keen on comparing it to past development cycles, we've all seen what's going on with Vista.

"We'll know just how much the schedule will need to shift as soon as we're able to fully test our current and forthcoming solutions on Intel-based Macs," Roz Ho added.

Although it's not completely unexpected for Microsoft to continue its 1997 deal with Apple, it does come as a bit of a surprise since in December 2005, Microsoft discontinued its support for Internet Explorer for Macs. On the software maker's Web site Microsoft posted: "In accordance with published support lifecycle policies, Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance update."

We'll have to wait and see how far the two companies will continue to work together after these five years since they're notoriously known for continuously competing and butting heads.