Office 2010 Sales on Track

Microsoft touted the adoption of Office 2010, calling it "the fastest selling version of Office ever" in a blog marking the one year anniversary of the latest version of the productivity suite, which shipped June 15 of last year. The first service pack for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 is expected later this month.

According to Microsoft, businesses are deploying Office 2010 at rates five times faster than Office 2007 during its first year.

The company has also declared Office 2010 the fastest-selling version of Office ever, though it didn't offer specific numbers to back that claim up. The software giant did, however, reveal that nearly 50 million people worldwide use Office Web Apps to view, edit, and share their documents from anywhere with a browser and an Internet connection. In a recent survey of Office 2010 users, 9 out of 10 said it's the best version of Office they've used. 96 percent would recommend it to others.

Deployments of Office 2010 are also beating those of Office 2003 “by a pretty significant margin,” Numoto said. Nine of 10 customers in a Microsoft satisfaction survey said 2010 was the best Office release ever, he said.

Sales in the business division, the company’s biggest, rose to $5.27 billion last quarter, exceeding the $4.9 billion average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

The Office business is being challenged by the growing popularity of so-called cloud software delivered over the Internet, which is allowing companies to choose from more options, Barnicle said. Delivering software as a service over the Internet may squeeze Microsoft’s profit margins, he said.