Microsoft Office for iPad only landed six weeks ago, but Microsoft claims it’s already been downloaded a whopping 27 million times.
The figure was thrown out by Julia White, the general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, who mentioned it during a keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s TechEd customer conference in Houston.
Office for iPad is a free app, but if you want to edit documents you have to have a paid Office 365 subscription. Since Microsoft claimed in April that it has 4.4 million paid users of the personal for the app, this means that roughly 23 million downloads aren’t accounted for.
The best thing that can be said is that it shows how Microsoft’s Office cash cow remains popular, even as users move from desktops and laptops to tablets, and buy iPads over Windows tablets.
Unless, of course, you believe our resident elder Charlie Sorrel — a man still stuck in an Apple vs. Microsoft battle, circa 1995 — who reckons that 99.9% of Office for iPad downloads are ironic, and people delete them straight after.
Either way, it would be interesting to see the conversion rate from free-to-paid users.
Source: Business Insider
