Ballmer, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other executives spent the day touting new Office XP features such as SharePoint, which allows employees to share information over a company's intranet, and task panes, which give users easy access to recently used documents and options. At a demonstration event in Washington, D.C., tech professionals and government workers packed into the MCI Center chortled when a demonstration of Office XP's PowerPoint program crashed and the program locked up. Office XP is immediately available in 15 countries. Microsoft will not say how many copies of Office XP will be shipped or give specific sales targets. But at a company event earlier this year, Ballmer said the company's goal was to sell 50 million copies.
Analysts are less optimistic.
So far, Enderle says, he has seen low demand for the product. He blames the lukewarm response to a marketing campaign that he doesn't think has done enough to show the product's new features. It's more how they're presenting themselves to the world. Some also questioned whether users will be sold on the idea of pricey upgrades in a weakening economy, especially since many recently upgraded to Office 2000. Ballmer said many may choose to upgrade over time, but he defended the company's decision to release the product now, even though the company's new operating system, called Windows XP, isn't due out until October.