Office 2000 Retail Ship Date Slips To June

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February 25, 1999 (12:00 AM EST)

Microsoft has pushed back the retail availability of its next-generation office suite until June, retailers said.

Microsoft Office 2000, which retailers expected to ship early in the second quarter, is now slated to hit store shelves on June 4, according to sources briefed on the publisher's plans.

Microsoft officials maintained they said all along the suite would be released to manufacturing in the first quarter and made widely available in the second quarter.

Retailers countered the actual ship date, originally set early in the second quarter, has been a moving target. The slip to summer, they said, is an inconvenience. Microsoft's "safe advertising" date, which lets retailers print advertisements for consumers, has changed from April to May to June, sources said.

Although the slip is minor compared with major delays in the shipment of Windows 2000 Professional (formerly known as NT 5.0), any delay that pushes Office 2000 closer to the summer months, when business is slower, is cause for concern among retailers.

"Shipping after the tax season, say in April, is better than June, when people are thinking about the beaches," said one retailer, who added, however, he expects foot traffic to increase because of close release dates of Microsoft Office 2000 and Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000. WordPerfect Office 2000 is scheduled to ship in May.

Office is a major cash cow for Microsoft. It generates roughly the same revenue for the world's largest software company as the Windows operating system -- and usually more during an upgrade cycle.

According to San Jose, Calif.-based Dataquest, Microsoft's applications and tools group, led by Office, generated $2.2 billion in revenue for Microsoft's second quarter, which ended in December. The platforms group generated slightly more, $2.3 billion, during the same period. For the comparable period in 1997, which ended several months after Office 97 shipped, the applications group earned $1.7 billion, or $2 million more than the platforms group.

Any delay in Microsoft Office 2000 is bad news for the company and its retail partners, analysts said.

"It's not a positive thing because all the marketing and merchandising programs will be rolled out internationally in the summer, and it's much better to have it in the spring," said Chris LeTocq, an analyst at Dataquest, noting the importance of Office 2000 to retailers in margins and add-on sales. "Any time you have an upgrade like this, it's an opportunity at retail to generate excitement and bring people in stores."

One company that plans to ride the Office 2000 wave isn't too concerned about the delay -- as long as it ships in the second quarter. Network Associates on June 15 is slated to ship an add-on utilities suite called McAfee Office 2000.

"We're promoting it in conjunction with Office 2000," a company official said.