It’s taken Microsoft’s Office for iPad productivity suite just 46 days to hit 27 million total downloads since it launched at the end of March. More impressive still is that downloads have more than doubled from the 12 million downloads it had achieved when we last heard about the apps’ success just a week after the launch. That’s the official figure given to the crowd at the Houston TechEd customer conference by the general manager of Microsoft’s Office Division, Julia White.
“About 27 million downloads” of the Office for iPad apps around the world since launch.
— Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) May 12, 2014
To take a bit of the shine off of the announcement, it is important to point out that the downloads are a combined total for the Word, PowerPoint and Excel apps which are each available to download separately.
Each of the apps allows for the viewing of documents with the ability to create and edit documents requiring a subscription to one of Microsoft’s Office 365 products to unlock. At its last earning announcement Microsoft said that there were already 4.4 million subscribers to the Office 365 Home package which costs R95 a month, although that package has since been supplanted as the lowest priced subscription with the introduction of Office 365 Personal earlier this year.
The rest of the users of the Office for iPad apps would therefore be made up by people without subscriptions who have just downloaded the apps to read documents as well as those whose companies have an Office 365 subscription in place which, once again according to Microsoft’s earning announcement, have almost doubled in the last year alone. What Microsoft won’t say however, is how many people have subscribed to the service after having downloaded the Office apps and how many individual Office 365 accounts have signed into the iPad apps after they’ve been downloaded.