REDMOND, Wash. -- March 5, 2001 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft¨ Office XP, the new version of the world's leading office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available for retail purchase later this spring. The company has completed extensive development and test efforts for Office XP, which is the most significant version of Office ever released. Major customers, industry partners and developers, including Timex Corp. and The Vanguard Group, are lining up in support of Office XP, which will deliver exciting new experiences for all types of customers, whether they are at home or in the enterprise. These experiences simplify productivity, enable collaboration for everyone, and provide flexible ways to solve business needs. "Office XP's greatest strength is that it delivers extensive new innovations that will truly improve the way people work by enabling them to be more efficient and productive with their PC," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office at Microsoft. "We worked with a wide range of customers to shape this product, and we are excited to see that customer response has been very positive about Office XP." Customer Evaluation Picks Up Speed More than 500,000 corporate customers have the opportunity to evaluate the Office XP corporate preview release over the next several months, and many customers already have expressed enthusiasm about Office XP. Customers are interested in the new productivity and collaboration capabilities delivered in Office XP, which will enable them to work more effectively and communicate better with others. "Office XP is an exciting new product that delivers vast productivity improvements to our organization," said Michel Fouchard, CIO of Timex. "From smart tags to SharePointª Team Services to reliability innovations, Office XP delivers a wealth of new features that will benefit everyone in our organization."