Microsoft continues to be its own toughest foe in the Office wars as acceptance of Office 2003 still only accounts for a tiny fraction of the desktop suite’s overall customer base. According to Gartner, Office XP, introduced in May, 2001, still accounts for 50 per cent of market share with Office 2000 not far behind with 45 per cent. Even Office 97, now relatively ancient (Microsoft stopped supporting the product early this year) has a four percent market share. Gartner is still projecting that Office 2003, which is coming up on its first year anniversary, will remain at one per cent share.What appears to be consistently holding down sales of Office 2003, despite a raft of technical, although incremental, improvements, is the lack of one or two outstanding new capabilities that would push corporate buyers to open up their purse strings. Conservative spending at the largest IT shops along with the late arrival of the first Service Pack for the 2003 version hasn’t helped either. The general consensus among leading research companies like IDC, Gartner and others is that Office still has its thumbs pressed firmly against the throat of the desktop applications market with over 90 per cent share of the market. IDC has even stopped producing regular reports specifically on the desktop applica-tions market because of Microsoft’s dominance there.“If you look at the way Microsoft typically delivers software, it’s through new PCs as well as through maintenance contracts. So even if companies have not deployed new software they have essentially paid for it. There might be a lag in actual deployments, but Microsoft already has it monies up front through those contracts,” said Mark Levitt IDC’s Research Vice president of Collaborative Computing. Gartner, however, has boldly predicted that by 2007 Star Office could wrest up to 10 per cent share away from Office. The company’s prediction seems to be based on Sun’s plans to charge for StarOffice 6.0 on both Linux and Windows. – Ed Scannell Technology Industry