Office System, Office Beta 2 Launched

As part of an aggressive push to create a larger market for Office, Microsoft will relaunch the Office brand as the “Office System” when the next version of the company’s desktop productivity suite ships later this year. The announcement coincided with the public beta of the next version of Office, which includes not only Office but betas of most of the major server releases planned for 2003 as well. So far, however, the Office System is mostly about branding: the beta offers only modest advances in integrating Microsoft’s desktop products with each other and with server applications.

Information Worker Strategy

The new brand is part of Microsoft’s Information Worker strategy, which the company hopes will rejuvenate the mature market for its desktop applications in three ways:

Redefine the market. Roughly 150 million people are licensed to use one or more components of the Office suite. Microsoft believes that by redefining what a business productivity application is and how people use it, it can gather many more users under the Office umbrella. For example, pilots who don’t sit in front of desktop computers still need to view flight plans, schedule changes, and advisories. Office components, combined with server applications such as SharePoint and Exchange, can generate, transmit, share, and view that data.