Microsoft to pour $3 billion into Office
eWeek | at | by Mike
Microsoft plans to spend more than $3 billion over the next three years on its Office productivity suite and hopes to double annual revenue from Office to $20 billion by 2010. "I have a $20 billion dream for Office, but the product will be so much more than what we think of today. There will be new categories of application value from a client standpoint, as well as around servers and XML services. "We can create enough value for this business to grow 10 percent a year over the next 10 years, giving us some $10 billion annually in revenue growth, alone, at the end of that time," said Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of productivity and business services, in a presentation at Microsoft's campus here on Monday afternoon.
Small-to-medium sized businesses are currently underserved with business applications, relatively compared to the large business market, he said. "This decade will see people demanding that they are able to interact electronically with all businesses, so my goal with the Great Plains and Navision acquisitions is to offer far more than just great accounting software.