Microsoft is making a significant push to leverage its partner community to promote customer upgrades and new sales of its Office productivity suite, a company executive said at Microsoft's recent Worldwide Partner Conference 2005 in Minneapolis.
Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker (IW) Product Management Group, acknowledged that many customers are not upgrading their Office suite because they believe the older versions they currently run are sufficient to compete in the current business environment.
"We're a victim of our own success in that Office 97, Office XP, [and other earlier versions] are products people like," Capossela says. "But to convince someone that the newer version is much better is harder because people are quite happy with their current product, and that product never expires. Software doesn't perish ever."
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