Microsoft: New Office has sold ‘well north’ of 20 million units

The latest version of Office has moved more than 20 million copies thus far, across its distribution SKUs.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Office 365 Home Premium passed the 1 million subscriber mark in a touch more than 100 days. Given its roughly $100 per year price point, that makes Office 365 for consumers a $100 million per year business.

Microsoft intoned that since its inception, the most recent version of Office – what it simply calls the “new Office” for simplicity – has sold over one copy per second since its launch on December 1st. How many seconds have elapsed since December 1st? WolframAlpha has the answer: 1.555×10^7 seconds, or 15,550,000. That indicates that Office has sold more than 15.5 million copies.

However, according to a statement provided to Neowin, the real figure is higher than the one-per-second statistic belies:

While we don’t break out specifics, I can share that we have sold more than 1 license or subscription every second since launch, which was December 1 for organizations and January 29 for consumers, which puts us well north of 20 million and counting.

It’s a hard number to parse, as we don’t have the breakdown of the sales varieties; how many subscriptions versus Software In A Box sales? But it does underlie the fact that the newest version of Office, building as it does on cloud offerings and the user interface ancestry of Office 2007 – in a way – has legs.

Free online services such as Google Drive have hoovered market share, but Office appears to be holding its own. Now, let’s see Office for iOS and we’ll have a real game.

Top Image Credit: Todd Bishop