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November 30, 2006
Sales of Office 2007 were substantially better than those of Office 2003 during the first week of its launch, according to a study comparing retail figures for both products.
In the first week of its launch in late January, Office 2007 unit sales exceeded first-week sales of Office 2003 by 108.3 percent, according to a preliminary report released Monday by the NPD Group, a consumer and retail trade researcher.
While the average selling price for Office 2007 declined 1.1 percent to $206.93, the dollar volume jumped by 106.3 percent compared with Office 2003, the report noted.
"Unit shipments grew faster than dollars," said Chris Swenson, NPD director of software industry analysis. He noted that sales of the cheaper Home and Student editions of Office contributed to the dip in average selling price.
NPD, however, said its preliminary figures are conservative, given that one participating retailer in its survey did not supply its information in time to be considered for the report.
Office 2007 commercial unit sales, meanwhile, climbed approximately 61.3 percent during its first month of sales, compared with Office 2003 in its first month, the report noted. The new version of Office was released to business customers in November.
Dollar volume rose 97.8 percent in the first month of Office 2007 commercial sales to value-added resellers, compared with the first month of Office 2003, the report noted. And the average selling price rose 22.6 percent over Office 2003 to $301.33 in its first month of sales.
"The Office 2007 launch was extremely successful, no matter how you look at it--whether it's the weekly or monthly sales," Swenson said.
He added that the launch performance of Office 2007 and Vista came as a surprise to him.
"With almost zero advertising and marketing until the January 30, 2007, retail launch, I expected U.S. commercial license sales of Office 2007, as with Windows Vista, to be significantly below the sales of the previous version in its first full month on the market," Swenson said. "They weren't. Sales of Office 2007 were significantly better."
See more CNET content tagged:
Microsoft Office 2007, NPD Group Inc., Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office, researcher
I got Office 2007 under Power Together, but now that I've used Word 07 I can see myself paying $100 for the student and teacher edition for my desktop PC.
Do OO supporters understand that?
Free doesn't always sells.. unless it's better.
Consumer pays for.. what is useful. I don't understand Oasis etc... but I understand
- ease of use
- features
- robustness
- Fast processes
when using OO, I get
- a overhead application that kills my machine
- doesn't do even half the job right
- lacks learnability features (always prompts me for the same stupid question ... while saving in MS formats)
I hope I am clear enuff.
MS will make billions off of these products. Word and Excel are much better than their OO counter parts....but not as much as the others I listed.
Add in collaboration with other products like Sharepoint Server 2007, Live communications server, Rights Management server and more and Office 2007 just kicks the cr@p out of any OO products.
MS really *really* got it right with this product. It works very well, looks nice, is very easy-to-learn, is easy to find what you need *when* you need it, etc.
Open Office looks like an 80's app. (and works like it) compared to Office 2007. Sorry, but that's the truth.
I'd love it if Office 2007 were free like Open Office, but my time is worth more than the frustrations of using Open Office.
I actually bought Vista *after* Office 2007 because of all of the not-so-good reviews of Vista... but wow, Vista is also pretty nice. Not sure why it's getting panned.
therefore, by definition, must hate everything that comes from
Microsoft. In general this is often true and have to confess not
being impressed at all with Office 2003, particularly when
compared to Office:mac 2004. However, Office 2007 is a
wonderful update and I'm thrown down my cash for a copy of it
following running the Technical Refresh for the past couple of
months. I'm currently finding it much easier to find the
functions that I want to use and discovering new ones that are
genuinely useful (for example, Excel's Delete Duplicates
function).
I understand that OpenOffice is free, supports open standards
and I really do wish it well. Unfortunately, at this point I just
don't find it good enough and therefore I'm going to stick with
Office 2007 and re-evaluate my decision at the next release.
"Composite" Application Functionalities You Say!
In fact, it throws away years of training for millions of users. This has to have an incredible cost for businesses in training (I am a professional trainer, MS Office Master Certified).
My evaluation--short(?) and sweet (not):
Office 97 was the definitive version for years (even Outlook was easier to use than the several following versions, though buggy)
Office 2000 had some neat whiz-bang features, but nothing 99% of users (yes, even sophisticated ones--most of the new features are not for power users, they're for beginners)
2002 was a beta for 2003. Worthless.
2003 is the new standard. Outlook had improved so tremendously, I barely mind it's labarynthine dialog box structure. The apps behave well and the gizmos finally come up in a useful context instead of slowing down your work process.
2007 is a marketing bonanza aimed at people who buy a car for its color.
That said, read on for the gory details if you want...
After 3 releases (2000, 2002, 2003)of forcing us to reset the toolbars/menus so we can see the buttons/commands, now we get a ribbon that takes up twice as much working area as the toolbars (I thought they were trying to give us more area by putting 2 toolbars on one row), changes constantly so you never know where anything is, presents only the simplest "duh" commands we've already memorized the shortcuts for, and doesn't even attempt to follow the decade+ old menu structure.
To add insult to injury, you can't customize the "designed for the microcephalic"(tm) ribbon unless you're a programmer.
Like we really need 50 million columns and rows in Excel. If you're anywhere near the 256/65,536 limit, you should export into a database app.
Oh, and don't forget the new schizophrenic Outlook! The PIM that can't decide what version it is!
If anything can be said in favor of 2007, it's that you can click the edge of a ribbon block to get to the main dialog box quickly, where you can actually get things done. Second, I haven't looked at Access yet, but I've been using it since version 1.1, and I have yet to see a noticeable change, except incompatibilities. I hope they've finally revamped the pathetic Report module.
Unfortunately, there may actual be some useful tools hidden in the mess that I won't get to use because I'm sticking with 2003. Couldn't they at least have allowed us to use the old interface? They let WordPerfect and 1-2-3 users adjust, why not MS Office users? OH! they're competing with THEMSELVES!
As for Open Office,- yeah, it does do what most people need, and does it well. But those of us who need more power need something more.
'nuff said? maybe too much...
Not sure what the difference was between each release.
But Office 2007 is an overhaul in terms of User Interface. It's so different that most company needs to think about upgrading, because it will involve a retraining of users. But guess what, the improvement is good. Although you feel handicapped at first, because you cannot find your old good menu, but new ribbon is much much easier to use, if you want to spend a little time to learn. Microsoft doesn't dump their old term/function, it's still the same (with improvement, of course), it's just located in different location. I can say Microsoft Access is the one that changes the most.
For reference, Mac releases were Office 3.0.1, 4.0.1, Office98, Office2001, OfficeX, Office 2004, with Office 2008 in the pipeline (hopefully before 2009).
On the PCs, I have openoffice.org
Microsoft makes such good products that I'm perfectly satified with the older ones <tongue-in-cheek>.
There hasn't been a single feature added since O97 that any of our users need or want. The only real difference is in Outlook and we discourage its use due for security reasons.
Microsoft is a victim of its early success. Almost no one ever needs to upgrade Office.
And I agree, as far as that is concerned, Office is better if you need that power, but if all you do is wanting to set up a simple spreadsheet with a few cells and a few formulas, then it is not Feasable to buy Office as it is too expensive and hyou can do everything your heart desired with the free openoffice.org, which also has it's pluses as well, for Macros and scripting it supports 4 different languages, and MS only supports VBA and nothing else.
I am still getting used to the new interface that's in 2007 and I do have the ultimate office 2007, that which a friend of mine who works at MS gave me from the employee store, so it only cost me $75, but If I had to pay the retail price I probably would not, unless my employer paid for it.
A lot of government bodies now and schools don't want to be locked into a propiotery format like Office and because of this reason they are choosing Open Office, which it will get better with time, for it's price $0.00, nothing can beat it, not even Microsoft Office.
Visio is great, a product that MS bought from another company, they didn't invent Visio at all.
PowerPoint is good if you prepare a lot of business stuff like for QBR or MMR or proposals, so unless you are in that kind of a role, you'll never have a need to use that.
Just my 2 cents!
- hhaa
- by jessiethe3rd February 13, 2007 11:59 AM PST
- Are you kidding me? IBM's slap together plan is way behind when it comes to Social Computing. Microsoft has been beaming Office/SharePoint/RTC Collaboration (LiveMeeting, Office Communicator) wayyyy before IBM finally jumped on the bandwagon. Microsoft's social computing initative is steps ahead of IBM in turns of overall integration. While IBM struggles to breath life into Notes and its remaining programers and proprietary developed application Microsoft is putting the power of collaboration in the hands of the users - not the programmers. Sorry dude but IBM just sucks when it comes to collaboration and the only... and I do mean ONLY reason customers stay with Notes is because of the propriertary applications developed on the platform. MOSS 2007 will be taking more out of that last (minor) hold out of IBM's platform. Websphere is getting torn into as well.
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- Oh! Oh!
- by Commander_Spock February 13, 2007 1:00 PM PST
- Another one has apparently been institutionalized having passed the KOOL AID TEST. Gee... whiz, what ever did this dude that is called Ray Ossie create that was sooooooo.............. poorly created that its present owner IBM is now struggling "to breath life into what is called "Notes; and, its remaining programers and proprietary developed application"; but look who is talking about the THREE Cs (Collaborate, Coordinate and Cooperate) that Ray Ossie must have know about for perhaps close to a decade or more; perhaps, youthfulness or memory loss may be having the better of "jessiethe3rd". Man, which international investor/venture capitalist in their right mind would not wish to get hold of that Russian school teacher (to help promote their open-source products and solutions) who is being threatened with possible detention in Russia's notorious Siberian prison camp!
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- Hey "jessiethe3rd"; Do Ya Wanna...
- by Commander_Spock February 13, 2007 2:44 PM PST
- ... show off some of that "Office/SharePoint/RTC Collaboration (LiveMeeting, Office Communicator" that folks at the Redmond Campus were beaming for a long time now; then, how come international project evaluations are taking Chinese and Russian dudes so long to get completed; read what this article says for ya self before ya shoot off ya crap about "IBM just sucks when it comes to collaboration and the only... and I do mean ONLY reason customers stay with Notes is because of the proprietary applications developed on the platform".
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Processing -
- ha indeed!
- by Penguinisto February 14, 2007 7:58 AM PST
- Umm, the *nix world has been beaming IRC, [i]talk[/i], and a whole industrial-sized bucket of office intercommunications tools, long before MSFT ever sold its first copy of 'doze.
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(49 Comments)Where in the world are those 1st and 2nd place computer programmers (as well as those smart OS/2 ones that were heard about too); are they in Siberia or what?
"A feasibility study for hydropower should not take so long, can't previous ones be re-evaluated?
Saturday, February 10th 2007"
http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56513805
Do ya think after all these years of copying OFFICE 2007 is ready for SHOW-TIME yet?
With Technical Analyses yet to come too you say. Huh!
If you want to impress those of us who have been around awhile, then tell your employers to build something that we can actually customize and sink our teeth into.
/P