As briefly reported (CI No 3,080) Microsoft Corp’s flashy new Office 97 started showing up on store shelves last Thursday as Bill Gates walked on stage at New York City’s Lincoln Center to launch a 30-city tour touting the latest Microsoft office suite. Microsoft boasted that it had some 3 million copies pre-sold to corporate customers, plus 500,000 copies on the shelves at 10,000 stores last week. The suite’s centrepiece is the Outlook program, which integrates electronic mail, contact management, scheduling and task management. Just about everything in the suite now comes with integrated hooks to the Internet. Office 97, which runs only on Windows 95 or NT, went into its gold release way back in November, and it has taken since then for the company to press the disks, stuff the boxes, and stock the retail shelves. Office 97 comes in four versions: starting with the $500 standard edition, with everything except the Access database. Upgrades are $200 and competitive upgrades $250. The Professional Edition with Access is $600, or $300 for upgrades and $350 for competitive upgrades. A Small Business Edition will be released in March for the same price as the Standard Edition. A Developer Edition, which is also due in March, will be priced at $800, with upgrades for $500 and competitive upgrades for $540. Microsoft Office 97 Starts Here, a compact disk to teach people how to use Office 97, was also released last week, priced at $30.
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