14 DAY TRIAL // Is Office 2007 both outgunning and outnumbering Windows Vista? Back in 2006, when it was effervescently getting ready for the releases of the new version of main cash cows, the Redmond company decided in a strategic move to bundle Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System together from a marketing perspective. This is why, at the end of November, Microsoft CEO Stave Ballmer introduced both Vista and Office 2007 to business customers at the NASDAQ headquarters in New York. Additionally, the consumer launch of the two flagship products - also in New York but with the participation of a larger number of Microsoft top executives, including Bill Gates, on January 30, 2007 - saw Vista and Office advertised together.
By synchronizing the births of the latest releases of the Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite, Microsoft has also connected the two in the perception of the consumers. But it seems that while Vista is banged up pretty bad in terms of adoption, Office 2007 is just cruising by. The Redmond company has so far applauded the fact that it has shipped in excess of 60 million Windows Vista licenses in the operating system's first six months of availability. For Microsoft, this number actually means the volume of Vista copies sold into the channel and not to the end users. But still, it is the only figure the company provided, and will provide, and it is at this point equivalent to just over 6% of the operating system market.
One aspect that Microsoft kept quiet about concerned the sales of Office 2007. While the market performance of Windows Vista was emphasized in order to push the operating system into the foreground, Office 2007 did not seem to raise the same amount of interest. However, Laurent Delaporte, a Director of Microsoft France (Directeur G?n?ral Adjoint), spilled the beans on the company's statistics for Office 2007. Since Office 2007 was introduced on the market, it sold in excess of 70 million licenses. 10 million more than Windows Vista. Outside of the figure provided by Delaporte, Microsoft refused to comment in any way the sales of Office 2007.
Still, one thing that the company managed to do was to move the winning team from Office to Windows. In this context, Steven Sinofsky is now "the senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group - the user experience of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live services." Before taking the lead of the Windows project, Sinofsky's role was to oversee the "development of the Microsoft Office system of programs". Sinofsky was joined on building the next version of Windows by none other than Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience at Microsoft. Before turning to Windows, Larson-Green was "responsible for leading the user-interface design for Office XP, Office 2003 and the 2007 Office System, which is being applauded for the innovation and reinvention of the user experience for productivity software." Now Sinofsky and Larson-Green are responsible for building Windows Seven, and a repeat of the office 2007 Fluent graphical user interface (the Ribbon) is apparently in the making.