Office 2007 - the best-selling software of the year

    According to statistics from the analytical company NPD Group , this year the US retail software market came to life after the recession of previous years and grew by as much as 9.7%. This is a lot, considering that in 2000-2006 the market declined annually by an average of 0.5%. Retailers in ecstasy. They are ready to kiss the feet of those who performed such a "miracle." The benefactor is, as you might guess, Microsoft, with little support from Apple and Adobe.

    The best-selling program of the year was the MS Office 2007 office suite, which captured 17.4% of the total US software market (in dollar terms), even taking into account computer games.



    Another popular segment in 2007 was operating systems. Their sales volume grew one and a half times. According to the NPD classification, this is the most expensive class of software with an average price of $ 166.71. Among all the OSs, Windows Vista sold best. In general, Windows products accounted for 78.2% of the operating system market, Mac OS X - 21.3%, and Linux - only 0.5%. This is not surprising, because popular Linux distributions are distributed free of charge, so they are not reflected in the statistics.

    In addition to the aforementioned programs, analysts note the commercial success of Adobe Creative Suite 3 and Apple Final Cut Studio 2. Like Vista and Office 2007, these programs were sold in several price categories, including the super-expensive and super-cheap versions, which also explains their combined success. It seems that this pricing policy of software manufacturers is becoming a standard trick.

    Apparently, the 2007 surge in the software market is temporary, and software sales will continue to decline in the future. Experts attribute this to the harmful influence of the "virus" open source, as well as other factors. For example, sales of PC games by statistics are reduced by 4% per year, because gamers run away to virtual worlds like WoW, where payment is by subscription, so in reality the turnover of the gaming market is only growing.

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