CIOL: What is the company doing for creating awareness about Office 2007?

Tarun Malik: We started forming a community called Microsoft Valued Professionals. These are independent domain experts who have expertise in Excel, Word, etc, and who are also Microsoft employees. We have started formulating a very regular club of CXOs and we chose a very informal topic in places such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru.

CIOL: How do you perceive the scope for Office 2007 in the Indian market?

TM: There are about 3,500 enterprises and another 4,000 medium enterprises and small businesses. In the large enterprises, we have more than 2,000 companies working at our office. Every year, we add 4 mn new customers.

Microsofts market share is around 97-98 percent for us. It is very critical for us to start making new customers aware and understand what they have, in terms of computing power in desktop.

CIOL: What about the home users who are using this product?

TM: In India we have installed personal computers to roughly 25 mn users, out of which about 10 mn are small businesses. The percentage of people in home users segment is still very insignificant. I think the trend is definitely changing and is coming up in large metros in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru but we still need to see the impact. We are very sensitive to feedback from customers. So, we have multiple levels of tools in Office and have priced at roughly less than Rs. 400. It has basic features which are critical for people using at home.

CIOL: How do you see the Office Live space vis--vis desktop environment?

TM: When we talk about cloud computing or computing through Internet, definitely Google is the leader in the space; but how we work is that we take a lot of feedback from customers where we counsel and advise customers worldwide.

It takes around three to four years to release the new version of the product. Within these four years, we work for customers and try to make new changes to the product which is critical. We have a new version of Office which is internally named as Office 14. We have a large functionality in features such as coding online, activity on mobile and larger leverage of cloud computing.

I think cloud computing is the future and we are very much into that. Our engineering team is working closely on products that are viable for customer needs. But there still is some time before we launch our new version and that is going to really have a large feature catering to that segment.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in