Applications briefs

Microsoft and Apple last week began offering customers in North America who purchase new Macintosh systems a $300 reduction on the price of Microsoft Office. From now to Jan. 7, 2003, customers who buy any new Mac will be eligible to purchase Microsoft Office v. X for Mac for $200. Its regular price is $500. Office Version X for Mac includes Word X, Excel X, PowerPoint X and Entourage X, an e-mail and calendaring program available only for the Mac. Customers will have to purchase Office at the same time they buy their Mac to receive the discount. www.apple.com

Inxight Software, which was spun off from Xerox PARC in 1997 to focus on content management and information retrieval, has introduced Smart Discovery 3.0, which combines technologies such as automatic categorization and the display of search results in a hierarchical view that previously had only been available separately. The product is aimed at managing unstructured data such as Microsoft Office files, Web pages, e-mail messages, research reports and news feeds. Inxight also announced a $22 million round of funding last week. Smart Discovery runs on Windows NT/2000 and Sun Solaris. Pricing is determined on a per-server basis and starts at about $250,000.