14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Vista is banged up pretty bad, according to a report from the NPD Group, while in contrast, the Office 2007 System is living it up. According to the data, Vista is delivering a market performance inferior to that of its predecessor, Windows XP, in terms of sales volumes at the U.S. retail outlets. Standalone unit sales of Microsoft's latest Windows platform are trailing far behind those of XP, 59.7% smaller in fact, in each product's respective first six months of general availability, with revenues down 41.5%. But while sales of boxed copies of Vista are lagging behind XP, the same is not the case for Office 2007.
Microsoft made Windows Vista and the Office 20-07 System available concomitantly both to business customers in November 2006, and to the general consumers in January 2007. The synchronization of the releases for its two main cash cows was a marketing strategy designed to push the perception that the company's flagship products are in fact built to work together. Still, customers are more convinced to buy Office 2007 retail copies than Windows Vista boxes. And, in fact, Office 2007 clearly outperformed Office 2003 in terms of sales.
U.S. retail stores managed to sell double the number of Office 2007 boxes from January until July, compared to the volume of Office 2003 copies delivered to customers in the suite's first six months on the market. NPD analyst Chris Swenson revealed that a large part of all Office sales in the first half of 2007, no less than 20%, are credited to Microsoft's productivity suite for the Mac platform. Currently, the Redmond company is working on Office for Mac 2008, planned for availability in 2008.
Additionally, Swenson stated that Microsoft is one of the top retailers of its own Office 2007 productivity suite. In this context, the company performed an excellent move by offering the Office 2007 System as a free trial download worth no less than 60 days. It seems that end users were convinced by the trial version to go ahead and buy the product, making Microsoft the second retailer of Office 2007.
Of course that you can download the trial version of Office 2007 right here.