The new or the old? The market success of the Office 2007 System depends strictly on Microsoft's marketing strategy. An estimated 450 million customers use Office on a daily basis. Outside the corporate environment, small businesses and home users will require re-education. In this context, Microsoft aims to push not only the Office 2007 Suite, but also to revamp customer mentality in order to trigger new acquisitions. "One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that old versions of software are good enough. Our business model of course allows you to keep using Office 2003 - the software doesn't really expire," explained Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Business Division.

With Windows, Microsoft is killing one product to breathe life into the other. Support for Windows XP SP1 was cut before Vista and Windows XP SP3 was postponed until 2008, a move that virtually kills service pack 3. But Microsoft will continue to support Office 2003. But will also fight customer perception that the product is good enough.

This is just a passive form of killing Office 2003. Sure, Microsoft will continue to feed patches and security updates into the system, but will recommend Office 2007. And it makes sense. In corporate environments where Office 2007 is intimately connected with Exchange and SharePoint Server and Office Communication Server, upgrading is the most comprehensive move; even more since the fast adoption of SharePoint has placed the server at the heart of the Information Worker (Office) business.

Home users and small businesses that use only limited aspects of the Office suite are addressed in a different manner by the Redmond Company. "One of the most compelling reasons to move to Office 2007 is the new simplified user interface, something called the Ribbon. It lets you get at far more of the power of the product. We've put in a lot of effort to redesign the interface but to make it still familiar but more natural," added Capossela revealing the existence of some 50,000 online help articles. Microsoft Office Open XML format is another argument that aims at approximately 40 million users of OpenOffice. Not convincing enough so far. Office 2007 will be officially released on November 30, although it is already available on MSDN, but Microsoft still has to convince us a lot more.