Microsoft’s Office 365 has had its time under the limelight recently, and since the software giant had rolled out the subscription-based consumer software service more than one year back, they have managed to achieve a total of 4.4 million paid users as per the latest quarterly financial results. It does seem to point towards the success of making that switch from using standalone software for its Office products to a monthly or yearly subscription model, considering how it was just in January this year that there were 3.5 million Office 365 Home subscribers.
Of course, one might argue that companies and enterprises that want to remain ahead of the curve would have to switch over to whatever model that Microsoft proposes anyway, unless they do not mind migrating over to a different platform for the rest of their productivity needs.
Do bear in mind that the announcement does not take into account any subscribers who might have actually signed up for the new Office 365 Personal, which so happens to be the cheaper version of Home that was introduced in April earlier this year. Personal would feature a price point of $6.99 monthly, or $69.99 on an annual basis, for access to Office software on a single PC and a single tablet. With Office 365 on the iPad having launched recently, it would be interesting to see whether the total number of subscribers will increase even more eventually.