14 DAY TRIAL // The Office 2007 System accompanied Windows Vista to the market for the general consumers on January 30, 2007. But the fact of the matter is that Microsoft had already made available the productivity suite for quite some time. The Redmond company began delivering Office 2007 at the beginning of December 2006 as a free 60-day trial version. The initiative was a marketing move designed not only to open up Office 2007 to all users, but also to let the product speak for itself. According to a report from market analysis firm NPD, the success of Microsoft's free trial program for Office 2007 is impacting the retail and dealer channels of the system.
A few weeks short of the first nine months of availability for Office 2007 and Microsoft is still offering for download the following suites: Office Professional 2007; Small Business 2007; Standard 2007 and Home and Student 2007; along with individual products: Office Accounting Professional 2007; Live Groove 2007; Project Standard 2007; Visio Standard 2007; Accounting Express 2007; OneNote 2007; Publisher 2007 and Visio Professional 2007. On top of the downloads, Microsoft is also offering for download the Office Product Keys worth 60 days of free trial for each of the products.
NPD is reporting that the program allowing wide access to Office 2007, turned to be nothing more than a hit, as end users opt to convert their trial versions of the software to full licenses via Microsoft rather than acquiring the system from retailers. NPD revealed that the Redmond company currently accounts for a total of 9% of the Office 2007 sales. Chris Swenson, NPD's director of software industry analysis associated Microsoft's growing share of the retail productivity suite market with the Office Trial conversions, as cited by Microsoft-Watch.
And of course that Microsoft's numbers with the Office 2007 System come as the productivity suite has delivered an overall sales performance far superior to that of its predecessor Office 2003. NPD estimated that Office 2007 retail sales in the U.S. jumped 59.6% since January 2007. Microsoft itself informed that it sold 70 million licenses of Office 2003 and Office 2007 in Fiscal Year 2007. The Redmond company is selling 58.1% more units of office 2007 compared to Office 2003. Currently Office accounts for 96.8% of the productivity suite market.
The free trial versions of Office 2007 are available for download here.