Microsoft Office 2010 Adopted 5 Times Faster Than Last Version

By Dina Bass



Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s biggest software maker, said corporate customers adopted the Office 2010 product five times faster than the previous version.


Sales to businesses outpaced those of Office 2007 through the first nine months of product availability, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said today. The 2010 software suite is the fastest selling update among regular consumers, and almost 50 million of them are using the Web-based versions of Office programs Microsoft released to combat Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Apps.


The company is announcing the numbers in a blog on the one- year anniversary of the product’s release, Takeshi Numoto, an Office vice president, said in an interview.


Microsoft’s Business Division unit, mostly sales from Office, has been exceeding analysts’ estimates, helping revenue growth as the Windows operating-system business loses some consumers to Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad. Mountain View, California-based Google has been trying to steal corporate and government customers from Office with online word-processing and spreadsheet software.


“The Office business is the one business people feel pretty good about,” said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc. in Portland, Oregon, who rates the shares “sector perform.” “It’s not really coming under the same kind of attacks” as Windows and mobile software.


Google Apps has been out for several years and there hasn’t been mass defections, he said in an interview.

Cloud Computing

Deployments of Office 2010 are also beating those of Office 2003 “by a pretty significant margin,” Numoto said. Nine of 10 customers in a Microsoft satisfaction survey said 2010 was the best Office release ever, he said.

Sales in the business division, the company’s biggest, rose to $5.27 billion last quarter, exceeding the $4.9 billion average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

The Office business is being challenged by the growing popularity of so-called cloud software delivered over the Internet, which is allowing companies to choose from more options, Barnicle said. Delivering software as a service over the Internet may squeeze Microsoft’s profit margins, he said.