At Microsoft"s annual financial analyst meeting this week, top executives outlined sketchy plans to introduce premium versions of products such as Windows and Office in hopes of driving more revenue growth.

CEO Steve Ballmer said the company expects to introduce a client-level enterprise edition as part of "the Windows Vista generation," as well as a higher-end version of Office. He compared the plan to the introduction of the professional edition of Windows, which he said drove "literally billions of dollars"" worth of increased sales over the home version of the client operating system.

Ballmer added that Microsoft is thinking about a new Office Server concept that would have premium client-access licenses associated with it, as well as a premium client-access license for Windows Server.

"It"s premium value to premium price," Ballmer said. "We"re, of course, going to keep the current product set around, and we"re going to have to prove to our customers that they want the premium value."

Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, said the capabilities Microsoft offers in sharing information, workflow, rights management and document lifecycle will become so "common sense" that businesses will want every desktop to have full access to the server capabilities in the Office product line. That, in turn, will drive client-access license revenue, he said.

Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft"s information worker division, said there are "servers that people haven"t even written rumors about yet." He added that the company is currently researching how it could configure a premium edition of the Office client but has yet to finalize details.

Les McCarter, director of IT infrastructure and operations at Hawaiian Electric Co. in Honolulu, said he hopes the premium products will be included as part of the utility"s enterprise agreement with Microsoft.

"Microsoft keeps talking about the partnership they"re creating with us, and I"d like to think they"d invite us to that party," McCarter said. "Our enterprise license is coming up this year, and we"ve got to evaluate the value of what we"re paying. They have to continue to add value to it, as opposed to us just renewing automatically."