Microsoft today released Office for Mac 2011 to the public. What is being lauded by both critics and Microsoft as the best version of Office for Mac ever, it's probably the first version of Office for Mac in a long time that is at near feature match with the Windows version, although it doesn't include all of the features. It also replaces the much hated Entourage email client for the less hated Outlook email client. You can pickup a copy now from the Microsoft store for $149 for Home and Student, or $279 for Business. The business version is the only package that includes Microsoft Outlook, and includes 1 year of free technical support from Microsoft. The home version only includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel and 90 days of support. MSDN & Technet users can download either from through their respective product sites and generate up to 5 keys. Office for Mac 2011 requires at least OS X 10.5.8 Leopard with an Intel processor.

Are your feet cold? Mine are, I think it's because hell just froze over. 9to5Mac has the goods:

A little tidbit from the Microsoft gathering this evening.  While demonstrating Outlook for Mac and the HTML rendering engine, Microsoft employees revealed that instead of using the Word HTML rendering that previous versions of Mac Office used (and the PC version as well), Microsoft has moved over to Apple’s Webkit rendering engine to render HTML mails.  Outlook 2011 also uses WebKit to create HTML mail.

Coupled with the recent announcement that they were moving Windows Live Spaces to Wordpress, I think Microsoft has managed to surprise me twice in one month. The fact that Microsoft is actually using open source code in products is a great start, one can only hope they're contributing back. Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac will be released tomorrow.