Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003, Student-Teacher Edition

Although Microsoft goes to some pains to hide it, Office 2003 has a split personality. The gnomes of Redmond toil feverishly to deliver features aimed at helping connect information workers to expensive and complex corporate servers. They're just following the money. Most of the revenue in the Office division comes from corporate customers. Microsoft sells Office desktop licenses by the tens of thousands to corporations, which then take their own sweet time to deploy the software. As of last July, nearly a year after the release of Office 2003, Information Week cited Microsoft estimates that about a third of its Office installed base was running Office XP, and an even higher percentage were running Office 2000 and even Office 97. Although the majority of its corporate customers have purchased licenses for Office upgrades that entitle them to use Office 2003, they're still using older versions, and many have no firm plans to switch to the most recent version. Meanwhile, the least heralded edition of Office 2003 has crept to the top of the sales charts and stayed there. In its most recent report, covering the end of February, NPDTechworld reported that Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition is the #1 best-selling software program in the Business category. (The Office 2003 Professional upgrade was #4.) On the All Categories list, Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition is the only productivity program to make the top 10.