David Pogue, who has written two books about computers and is a contributing editor of Macworld, the Macintosh publication, agrees. "CD-ROM is very, very hot," he said. "They are being gobbled up by millions, and that has been an incentive of software companies to put together something as quickly as possible — shovelware — just to get something on the market. Cookbooks still beat them."

Leaving the "shovelware" days of simply piling huge databases onto CD-ROM disks behind, Microsoft Office is expected to give a hint to the future vision of CD-ROM software.