Like most industry watchers, when Microsoft launched Office for iPad I kvetched that it was too little too late. Nice try, Redmond, but you still suck. Well, like everybody else, I was wrong. In the roughly 50 days since Office for iPad shipped, users have downloaded it a kerjillion times.
For you boys and girls keeping score at home, that is “awesome level” success.
On Monday at the TechEd Conference, Microsoft General Manager for Office Julia White announced that Office for iPad — an individual packaged and collectively price suite of apps — had been downloaded more than 27 million times.
“Here is the latest download information about the apps. It looks like we have about 27 million downloads,” said White. “Not bad for just the top 10 countries.”
Or put another way, that”s nearly 587,000 downloads a day.
Office for iPad: A Big Deal
http://youtu.be/frpsGFQ4AIY
Now your Microsoft Office documents look casino online better than ever on iPad! The Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps have the familiar Office look and feel along with an intuitive touch experience, so you”ll be up and running in no time. When you edit a document on the iPad, you can be sure that you won”t lose any content or formatting.
Office for iPad apps — Word for iPad, PowerPoint for iPad, Excel for iPad, OneNote for iPad — are all free with functionality limited to reading and presenting documents. The ability to create, edit and share Office for iPad documents requires an Office 365 subscription, which sells for $9.99 a month or $99.99 for a full year.
If you assume, just for giggles, that 1 in 10 of those 27 million actually sign up for an Office 365 subscription, Office for iPad has generated ($99 x 2.7 million) $267.3 million in revenue. Of that, Apple would get $80 million and Microsoft”s haul, this ain”t chump change, would be $187.1 million.
Good for you, Microsoft — Office for iPad is already a huge success!
What”s your take?