John Lamb on ... the impending success of Office 97

After three years, $200m (#118m)-worth of investment and beta tests with 150,000 users, Microsoft last week rolled out Office 97.

With about 50% of its revenues already coming from Office 95, Microsoft is betting the farm on the latest upgrade. Research company Workgroup Strategic Services predicts sales of 19.9 million copies this year, boosting Microsoft's share of the office suite market from 85% to 88%.

Half the sales will be upgrades costing between #169 and #279. The rest will be new users who will pay between #330 and #430 to buy the product from PC stores, or bundled with hardware.

Many UK IT departments are bracing themselves for a flood of requests for the revamped Office from users. Others are likely to wait and see.

Business users have not been as keen on Windows 95 as those who use PCs at home - many business users have already opted for Windows NT.

Not that Microsoft has left many stones unturned in its quest to build a better mouse trap. Users have been consulted so extensively on the new product that it's a wonder they got any work done. They have been herded into Microsoft's Seattle usability labs for 25,000 hours of keyboarding; their help calls have been analysed to see what improvements could be made; and time and motion studies have assessed how common office tasks are carried out.

Despite all this effort, Microsoft is still hedging its bets. Chief financial officer Mike Brown has already warned that Microsoft's growth, running at 27% a year at present, will drop to 20% this year.

But financial analysts point out that Microsoft has consistently overshot its forecasts in recent years.

Apart from some carping from 3M that a yellow note designed to be 'stuck' on documents was too like its own Post-It notes, and some raised eyebrows over the 191Mb required to run the full package, Office 97 has opened to rave reviews.

The usual suspects - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Exchange - are still there, with some improvements. In Office 97 the applications are all related to a core application called Outlook, in which email and a personal organiser are combined, instead of being tied together by a ropey set of integration tools.

Outlook contains a calendar, contact and to-do program synthesised with Exchange, Schedule Plus and Microsoft email. Other applications are hung off this central hub, sharing a common Web browser button bar so that users can publish data on intranets or the Web.

The main goal of the upgrade is to improve communications between documents.

'We want you to have to enter information only once,' explains Robert Bach, vice president of marketing at Microsoft's desktop applications division.

Thanks to Microsoft's position, huge resources and its increasingly accurate take on what people want from desktop software, it looks as though Office 97 is going to be a re-run of Windows 95, with Microsoft's well-oiled marketing machine firing on all cylinders.