One of the counting games played in connection with Microsoft products involves the market performances of the company's main cash cows. And in this context, both the Office 2007 System and Windows Vista are in the limelight. There is no actual competition between the latest versions of the Office productivity suite and the Windows operating system, as obviously the two are in whole different leagues. Still, since Office 2007 and Vista had the same start, in November 2006 for businesses and in January 2007 for general consumers, there is a perception that the two are items of the same couple, and are racing together. A perception generated and fueled by Microsoft itself, when the company synchronized the availability of its flagship products.

At the end of the past week, Laurent Delaporte, a Director with Microsoft France (Directeur Général Adjoint) draw the line on the company's results in the 2007 fiscal year, in a meeting with the press. Delaporte repeated the officially applauded Microsoft figure of 60 million shipped Vista licenses worldwide. But he also managed to spill the beans on the sales of the Office 2007 System. While being completely quiet so far on Office 2007 sales, the fact that the latest version of the productivity suite pushed over 70 million licenses, 10 million more than Windows Vista, was more than just newsworthy.

However, it seems that the 70 million sold copies of Office 2007 is a scenario too good to be true, although in a report put together by the NPD Group, boxed sales of the productivity system outweigh those of Vista at retail channels in the U.S. Jacob Jaffe, Director of Microsoft Office denied Office 2007 having sold 70 million copies.

"Customers continue to tell us that our solutions deliver the ease of use, reliability and security that they need. This is validated by the strong adoption and usage seen by Microsoft Office having sold more than 71 million licenses in just the last Microsoft fiscal year. Our long history in meeting the complex needs of enterprise customers, a partner ecosystem that has grown 43% on the Office platform since last year and our current and future investments in the software + services arena will deliver even more flexibility to customers", Jaffe stated as cited by Mary Jo Foley.

So Office has indeed shipped over 70 million copies, but not Office 2007. And the fiscal year 2007, for Microsoft stretches between July 2006 and June 2007, so it is clear that the figure does not represent sales of Office 2007 alone. The data was initially delivered at the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007 at the end of July.

"For Office, we had very strong enterprise agreement renewals, and we also had very strong transaction business. The net result was that we delivered 71 million Office licenses in this past fiscal year. So both new licenses and upgrades, tremendous year for us. Now, I'm very pleased by the adoption of the - of Office 2007 because it really sets the stage for fuller investment in information work productivity by our customers", stated Jeff Raikes, President, Microsoft Business Division.