Stephen Baker, NPD Group's v . p . of industry analytics, on Tuesday known as the first couple of weeks of sales for office professional plus 2010 product "a bit disappointing."

The group's findings, which stem from its Weekly Tracking Service, were posted to NPD's company blog on Tuesday, and reveal that both quantity of units sold and also the money produced from Office 2010 are under these were for that first couple of weeks of sales for Office 2007. However, the findings also show that Microsoft is "in line, and actually slightly ahead of" the expected 2010 twelve months sales trends for Office 2007.

According to Baker, many from the problem lies in the fact that current buy windows 7 professional users don't have because a reason to upgrade because they did previously. "Office 2007 was a radical new design that certainly helped generate a lot of curious buyers and it premiered nearly parallel with Vista, adding a good deal of promotional activity within the software aisle, each of which likely helped drive initial sales of Office 2007," Baker said. Baker also pointed towards the improvement in release timing, as Office 2007 was launched prior to the busy holiday shopping season, whereas the 2010 edition came in the slower summer months.

Strangely enough, Baker dismissed online cheap Windows 10 suites like Google Docs, Zoho, and ThinkFree, in addition to free office software like OpenOffice stealing share of the market away from Microsoft. "These products have little awareness among the mainstream consumer who is the retail boxed version's primary customer," Baker said. "Over time that it is certainly likely that we'll see some slowdown in retail sales as consumers alter their productivity software habits, but that time isn't now." Instead, Baker pointed to Microsoft's frequent development cycle as the problem, saying that there were plenty of functional copies of previous many years of Office in the wild, providing people with little reason to invest again.