Microsoft officials are not commenting on the features in any part of Office 15; on the planned release-to-manufacturing (RTM) or general availability date; or on whether the technical preview will include a version of Office that will work on Windows 8 on ARM. (I asked about all of these.) Update: Also, for those asking, we also have no idea on platform-support specifics — such as whether this preview also encompasses the rumored Office for iPad; and whether it includes a separate non-touch-centric Office 15 update for those not using tablets/touch-enabled laptops.

I hope that Microsoft is working on an ambitious touch-centric version of Office for Windows 8. It would be odd if it wasn’t. But I’m not sure what the implications will be–is it even possible to create a touch version of Excel that will please a spreadsheet jockey?–and look forward to hearing what Microsoft has to say when it’s ready to talk.

The thing is, The Daily’s story doesn’t claim to have any inside information that even hints at the $10 price point, let alone confirms it. The article is a gumbo of scuttlebutt and supposition–and downright incoherent in spots–but here are the relevant paragraphs:

In addition to an iPad-ready version, a new edition of Office is expected for OS X Lion sometime next year. The current version of the desktop package, Office 2011, officially supports iOS versions up to Snow Leopard. A Lion version, likely available via the Mac App Store, is widely expected. Windows, too, is due for an update, with Office 2012 currently in beta form.

It’s assumed that both of these would work with Office 365 as well as mobile versions, such as Windows Phone’s Office Hub. Because it would be compatible with these full suites rather than as stand-alone apps, the pricing will most likely be significantly lower than existing Office products. In fact, it’s likely the cost will be around the $10 price point that Apple has established for its Pages, Numbers and Keynote products.

If you fully understand these two paragraphs, you’re a lot smarter than I am. Putting aside the fact that it says Snow Leopard is a version of iOS rather than OS X, it makes reference to the next Mac and Windows versions of Office. Then it says “it’s assumed” (by whom?) that “both of these” will “work with” Office 365 and Windows Phone.

Next, the story says “it would be compatible with these full suites rather than as stand-alone apps, the price will most likely be significantly lower than existing Office products.” I think<he "it" in question is Office for the iPad, and that Hickey is saying that it's probably going to be a feature-reduced complement to existing versions of Office rather than a full-featured suite, and priced accordingly.

And then Hickey says the price will "likely" be around $10. I assume he means per app, not for the whole shebang. And if his sources told him that Microsoft was talking about the ten buck-price point, he doesn't say so. He seems to be trying to make an educated guess.

Could Microsoft charge $10 a pop for iPad versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? Sure. But it might also give them away for free, as it does with the Office Web Apps and Office Starter Edition. Or it might release super-meaty programs aimed at business customers that go for quite a bit more than $10. I don’t think we know.

As ZDnet’s James Kendrick notes, the Office iPad pricing question is interesting on multiple levels, including the dynamic it may have with the touch-centric Windows 8 version of Office which is presumably in the works. But let’s see what happens. Don’t be too surprised if some of the things Hickey says are “likely” to happen don’t pan out exactly as he supposes.

I will quibble with one point in Jeremy’s post: He says that early demos of Windows Vista were “awesome.” I remember spending what seemed like eons running early versions of Vista and being briefed by Microsoft on them, and being consistently underwhelmed. I expressed some guardedVista skepticism well before the OS shipped, but to this day I wish I’d been even more skeptical even earlier. Then I could say “I told you so…”

Office 365 enters the market as the instant archrival of Google’s Google Apps, but the two services are anything but exact counterparts. Philosophically, they’re at odds: Google Apps is based on the idea that you’ll do most or all of your work using Web-based apps, resorting to a traditional suite such as Microsoft Office either not at all or only in a pinch. (Google continues to acknowledge that many businesses aren’t ready to dump Office by introducing features designed to make Apps and Office work better together.)

Microsoft, oddly enough, thinks that most companies don’t want to get rid of Office in its traditional software form. So Office 365 is designed to supplement old-school Office rather than render it irrelevant, by making it easier to deploy and manage Microsoft Web-based services that complement the Office suite, including the Exchange e-mail platform, SharePoint collaboration, and Lync communications system. (You can either continue to buy the desktop suite the old fashioned way, or pay for it on a subscription basis as part of Office 365.)

Office 365 also builds in the Office Web Apps versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, junior-sized versions of their desktop antecedents which are still pretty limited when it comes to features, although they do a nice job of rendering documents properly. You can also use the Office Web Apps for free, but the freebie editions are aimed at consumers and tie into Hotmail and Microsoft’s SkyDrive service; the Office 365 ones work with Exchange and SharePoint and are therefore much better-suited to business use.

Various versions of Office 365 are aimed at organizations of all sorts, from one-person professional service firms to megacorporations. A version called Plan P1 is designed for small businesses, giving them hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office Web Apps for the reasonable price of $6 per user per month.

To riff on Google App’s oft-repeated concept of “Going Google,” Office 365 provides a one-stop way to Go Microsoft. I think that the small businesses who will find it most attractive are ones who are already serious, reasonably happy Office users and are comfortable with the idea of becoming even more Office-centric–not malcontents who are tempted by Google Apps. For instance, while you can use Outlook with any e-mail server, using Office 365 provides access to a bunch of features which are dependent on the Exchange server, such as full-blown workgroup calendaring, without requiring you to set up an Exchange server.

Me, I still find myself veering between Google Apps and desktop Office, depending on what I’m doing. I want it all: apps as powerful as old-school Office that live in the browser like Google Apps, with both Google’s painless collaboration features and the Office Web Apps’ slick document rendering. It’s going to be great to watch Office 365 and Google Apps duke it out, but both Microsoft and Google have a long, long way to go. Google, in fact, is still adding extremely basic stuff like pagination and doesn’t quite have an answer for the question “how do I stay productive when I don’t have an Internet connection?” And Microsoft is still financially and emotionally invested in desktop software in a way that may limit the ambition of the Office Web Apps. (We’ll know that’s changed when a fairly serious Office user can look at the Web apps and say to him or herself, “Hey, I could use this for 90% of my work.”)

For more details on Office 365, check out Elsa Wenzel’s story over at PCWorld.

OneNote for iPhone syncs with OneNote’s other incarnations on Windows, on the Web, and on Windows Phone 7. (It does so using Microsoft’s SkyDrive online storage service, and you need a Live ID to use the app.) It’s easy to use and has basic note-taking features, including the ability to add photos and checklist items. It does feel more like a complement to OneNote’s other versions than a fully autonomous app–I don’t see any way to create a new notebook, for instance–and it certainly doesn’t compete with the 800-pound gorilla of note-taking, EverNote, in terms of features and supported platforms. But OneNote users who have iPhones should be pleased to have access to their jottings on the go, and it’s good to see the app arrive on the single most important smartphone platform. (Microsoft says it plans to update the software as time goes on.)

The most intriguing thing about OneNote for the iPhone is the fact that it brings a little bit of Microsoft Office to iOS for the first time. There have been rumors in the past that Microsoft was considering releasing a version of Office for the iPhone and/or iPad, but this is the first tangible proof that the company doesn’t think it’s self-destructive to put part of Office on an Apple mobile device rather than preserve it for Windows Phone 7, which includes mobile versions of OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook as standard equipment.

So are the other Office apps on their way to iOS? It’s not a pressing question given that both Docs to Go and Quickoffice give Office users Office-compatible iOS apps already. But when I asked Microsoft Senior Director Jason Bunge about whether OneNote was a hint of more Office to come, he didn’t pre-announce anything but he did say that Microsoft wanted to give Office to its customers in the way they want, on the devices they use, and that it plans to release more products based on that philosophy. I chose to take that as a promising sign–at least a lot more so than if he’d given me the standard disclaimer about refusing to discuss future plans at all. (I also asked him whether there’d be an iPad-specific version of OneNote; in that case, he did simply say that he had no news.)

If you check out OneNote Mobile for iPhone, let us know what you think.