According to The NPD Group, U.S. retail sales of non-games software totaled $3.3 billion in 2007, a 15 percent increase over the $2.9 billion generated in 2006.

“Due to a ‘perfect storm’ of new product releases, particularly the simultaneous release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, the non-games software market had its best year in U.S. retail since 1999,” said Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis, The NPD Group. “Previously, sales growth for the non-games software market had been relatively flat from 2000 through the end of 2006.”

Thanks in large part to new product introductions from companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Adobe, the most significant increases in revenue were seen in operating system, business, finance and imaging/graphics software categories, which posted respective dollar sales increases of 58 percent, 41 percent, 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively, over 2006. Losses were posted in personal productivity and education categories, which experienced respective dollar declines of 18 percent and 17 percent over the same time period.

Despite flat sales in the overall system utilities category, security software dollar volume is up 16 percent for the year, driven primarily by a 55 percent increase in the security suite software category. The top four publishers of security suite software, Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Microsoft, all experienced year-over-year dollar volume gains in 2007.

According to NPD, Microsoft Office, in particular, generated strong sales in retail in 2007. The Office suite accounted for 17 percent of all dollar volume in the U.S. retail PC software market, and Office 2007 unit sales experienced year-over-year growth of 50 percent.

“Interestingly, the combined year-over-year dollar volume growth from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office is roughly 80 percent of the year-over-year dollar volume growth for the entire PC software retail market,” said Swenson. “Thus, one can't overstate just how important Windows Vista and Office are for U.S. retailers.”

Adobe helped lift the Imaging & Graphics category, introducing a new version of its Creative Suite (and all of the leading tools in Adobe’s suite of products), selling approximately 80 percent more units than the prior version was able to sell over the same period of time.

The tax software publishers, Intuit and H&R Block, had a banner year as well.

“After eliminating rebates and state tax skus, which caused year-over-year retail tax software sales to drop in 2006, the companies worked on making their premium products more attractive to end users in 2007, which helped significantly drive dollar growth in 2007,” said Swenson