The Bundling Boogie

Packaging its collection of desktop applications into a single, attractively priced bundle is considered one of the most brilliant marketing moves ever made at Microsoft. The WordPerfect word processor and the Lotus spreadsheet were far more popular than Word and Excel at one time, but were owned by different companies that would not work together. Office gave customers both word processing and a spreadsheet for only slightly more money than either of the other products. PowerPoint expanded the utility of Office even further, and exacted enormous collateral damage in the presentation software market. Though considered a mediocre also-ran when first introduced, PowerPoint quickly overwhelmed presentation market leaders, such as Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion, because its basic features were easy to use, and few customers were willing to pay hundreds of dollars more than they had already paid for Office to get the incremental power of Harvard Graphics or Persuasion.

Microsoft has tweaked the Office bundle over the years, creating different versions of the bundle and adding more programs to it. However, with Office XP, the company appears to be moving away from using Office as a catchall bundle for its desktop software.