Microsoft Rolls Out Office 97

June 25th, 2007

Microsoft Corp. released to manufacturing yesterday its
Office 97 personal productivity suite, with Chairman and CEO Bill Gates
touting its Internet integration and natural-language capabilities.

The suite includes Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and
Outlook applications, with integrated e-mail, scheduling and access to
documents. The software, which will be available in U.S. stores Jan. 12,
automatically underlines sentences that may be grammatically incorrect by
using a natural-language inference engine.

It’s the first time technology from our research group is in a shipping
product, Gates said in his presentation last night at Comdex.

Microsoft plans to bring the natural-language capabilities to every
language version of the software, Gates said.

Gates also demonstrated the Internet connectivity, which allows users to
create live links to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents in the
applications and to publish Web documents on intranet servers.

Pricing is as follows: Office 97, Standard Edition, will sell for an
estimated retail price of US$209 for version upgrades, $249 for upgrades
from non-Microsoft suites or desktop applications, and $499 for new
users. For Office 97 Professional Edition, the price will be $309, $349,
and $599 respectively. For Office 97 Small Business Edition, the prices
are $209, $249, and $499 respectively. Office 97 Developer Edition is
priced at $499, $539, and $799, respectively.

Microsoft also showcased certified Office 97 compatible applications. A
compatible application follows the interface conventions and offers data
compatibility with Office 97.

According to Michael Graff, group product manager for Microsoft Office,
there are about 150 applications certified compatible with Office 95.
Microsoft hopes to have 50 to 75 certified compatible with Office 97 over
the next six months, and 150 within a year, Graff said.

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