There have been over 100 million downloads of Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android. That’s an astonishingly high number considering that the Office suite hasn’t even been on those platforms for a year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expounded on the success of Office in the 3rd quarter earnings call yesterday.
“We are clearly taking Office everywhere. Core to our mobile first strategy is to ensure that our service end points are on every mobile device, and to that end we have seen continued momentum with more than 100 million downloads of Office on iPhones, iPads, and Android tablets. And, with the release of Outlook on iOS and Android this quarter, updates to our OneDrive applications, and a preview of the forthcoming Office for Mac, we’re making Office available to even more users on more devices.”
As a result of more users downloading Office and a continuing push to promote the Cloud, Microsoft’s Office 365 is growing as well. In the same call Satya Nadella said “Office 365 Consumer added an average of 1 million new customers per month and we now have more than 12 million subscribers, an increase of 35 percent over the prior quarter.” The growth of Office 365 is a key component of the future of Microsoft. It is one of the faces of Microsoft’s growing cloud platform.
In addition to the success of Office and Office 365, Nadella spoke on the overall success of the cloud “While our commercial cloud business is expanding dramatically, we are also seeing strong growth in our consumer cloud services.”
The success of the cloud is a key arrow in Microsoft’s quiver. Yesterday a set of financial reports were released, and while the reports had a mixture of good and bad news, they reflect a company transitioning to the cloud. Investors seem to agree that Microsoft is doing something right because in the less than 24 hours since the reports were released $MSFT is up over 8% in early trading.
