While the Redmond Company is approaching at fast pace January 29, 2007, the date when Microsoft Word will be available for the general public together with the rest of the 2007 Microsoft Office System, the company's flagship text processing application has turned 18.

Word was launched in 1989, and it has a price tag of $500. Microsoft Office Word 2007 will be available for purchase come January 29, 2007 and will cost $229 for a new license and $109.95 for an upgrade. In fact, you can read additional details about the pricing of the Microsoft Office 2007 Programs following this link.

Office Word's origins can be traced to Bravo, Xerox PARC's GUI word processor, and started being developed by the Redmond Company concomitantly with Bravo's creator Charles Simonyi transitioning to Microsoft in 1981. The 1983 Microsoft Word released for IBM machines was the first text editing application to feature the What You See Is What You Get design concept, having the ability to display bold and italic text.

Although the details mentioned above precede by almost a decade the year 1989, Microsoft considers this the actual birth of Word. According to statistics made public by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the Office System is currently deployed on in excess of 450 million machines worldwide. And in fact, with the release of the 2007 Microsoft Office System, the Redmond Company is looking to convince approximately half a billion customers to make the swap.

I must tell you that they have convinced me. This article has been written on Microsoft Office Word 2007. If you want to try out a copy simply follow this link, and you will be able to download a 60 days free trial version of your favorite 2007 Microsoft Office System.