Microsoft is making Office 2007 its default productivity suite for system builders, less than five months after the suite's full-scale launch.

Say Goodbye to Office 2003: Microsoft will stop supplying OEM Microsoft Office 2003 from June 30, Microsoft exec Eric Ligman wrote yesterday on the company's blog for small businesses.

The declaration means that Microsoft partners without inventory of Office 2003 must ship Office 2007 from July onwards.

Microsoft is making a heavy push for Office 2007 and seems to be now using OEM partners in the vanguard for driving sales.

Previous editions of Office have sold relatively slowly during the last 10 years, with a sizeable percentage of the customer base clinging to increasingly out-dated editions. That's a problem for Microsoft, as it means a key product in its core business isn't growing as it should.

Office 2007 is relatively early in the Microsoft lifecycle, having officially launched in January following limited availability in November, while Office 2003 was launched in October 2003. The older product still enjoys mainstream product support from Microsoft and partners, while also being well within its extended lifecycle support.

Must admit Office 2007 is way ahead of 2003, I really like it.

I couldn't stand it. It took so much time to navigate through te tools and there were issues with compatibility between it and older versions for me.

... Or it may have just been the fact that the computer I used it on sucked and lagged too much for me to enjoy it.

Must admit Office 2007 is way ahead of 2003, I really like it.

I agree. It took a bit to get used to all the features (and figure out where they all are), but once you do, it's really nice.

Ya it was confusing at first, but now that I've used it alot it's much better than 2003.

Damian

I like it lots better (only put it on a couple of weeks ago) but its a memory hog !! I pretty much have outlook always open and I can feel it bogging down my desktop.. Dread to think how the lappy will go..

with a sizeable percentage of the customer base clinging to increasingly out-dated editions.

In practical terms Office 2007 doesn't offer much additional functionality over previous versions, so I would hardly describe it as 'clinging' when you consider that it is not exactly cheap.

M$ might be better off simplifying Office rather than adding more [unused] features.

Open Office is the way to go. It has all the functionality 99+% of users need and is free. At this point, I would not even accept a free copy of Office 2007--for one thing, you are paying Microsoft to slow down your machine.

It is time to finally avoid the latest attempt by Microsoft to grab market share with smoke and mirrors; Boycott Office 2007 and switch to a better alternative.

No, I am not affiliated with Open Office in any way. I am simply a pc user who is sick of Microsoft tactics. It's not just Microsoft: there's tons of open source software that is better than the bloated old alternatives.

Other software I don't use because it is to big and bloated and the open source alternative is better:

Windows Media Player

Outlook

ACDSee

Windows XP Search

Internet Explorer

I used Open Office for the last couple of months on my new laptop and was quite happy with it. Very little pain switching as the menus are so similar. I think it's actually better than Office 2003 because it is significantly less broken.

I ended up buying Office 2007 eventually as I got a dirt cheap deal through uni (AUD$ 75). but there's no way I would ever pay full price for it.