One company would sell the Windows operating system, another would sell software applications such as the Office software suite, and the third would sell internet-related software and services.
Gartner - a tech consultancy - said the fact Windows RT offered Microsoft's Office software suite, would act in its favour, but might not be enough to compensate for other "missing" software.
The MS Office suite entails productivity software applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access.
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The vulnerabilities fixed by other patches are found in a variety of Windows programs including the Office software suite and the Internet Explorer browser.
On 8 August Microsoft released a bumper collection of security patches for 23 separate flaws in Windows and programs in the Office software suite.
Microsoft has traditionally enjoyed very high operating profit margins on its enterprise software products like the Office suite as the incremental costs of producing one more copy of the software are very low.
As for office management software, Microsoft Office Small Business--with its suite of tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook--is still the standard.
But that is perfectly adequate to run the customised version of Linux that comes pre-installed on it, along with a suite of software, including Open Office.
Microsoft's other software, including its Office 97 suite, does not even make the top-20 list, outsold by the likes of racing games, Tomb Raider's pneumatic Lara Croft, and the perennial best-seller, Myst.
Moreover, while Microsoft's Vista operating system has received mediocre reviews, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant offers a host of tools, from e-mail software to its ubiquitous Office productivity suite, that will make it impossible to break Windows' lock on big businesses anytime soon.
Gates also revealed the addition of new applications to Microsoft Office, the company's dominant productivity software suite.
In addition to retail sales to individual consumers, Google is trying to sell Chromebooks to the millions of student, corporate and government customers that use Google Apps, the company's suite of Web software that competes with Microsoft's Office.
Google and Singtel are rapidly signing up small and medium-sized companies in Asia to use the Google Apps suite of web software (email, video, chat, office software like Microsoft Office).
Microsoft Corporation , one of the biggest software companies in the world, makes money primarily via sales of its Microsoft Office productivity suite and Windows operating system.
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