A screenshot of the Microsoft Office 2016 word processing software. (Photo : www.office.com)
More than half of new purchases of Microsoft’s Office suite in Taiwan over the past year were through subscription-based plans, outpacing the worldwide average, as the U.S. software titan’s cloud-first strategy starts to take fruit.
Over 50 percent of the new Office purchases in Taiwan between July 2014 and June 2015 were subscriptions to Office 365 Personal or Home plans, Enyen Cheong, business group leader of applications and services at Microsoft Taiwan's marketing and operations division, said during the local release of Windows Office 2015 on Friday.
According to Cheong, the figure has "more than doubled" from the previous 12-month period, which is the first year of sales for Office 365 in Taiwan.
Cheong attributed the growth in Taiwan to Microsoft's marketing campaign of building consumer awareness of its online Office services, as well as rising adoption by OEM partners to sell their PCs bundled with a one-year free subscription to Office 365 rather than a license for a retail version.
An annual subscription to the Office 365 Personal plan, which includes upgrades to Office 2016 applications for a single PC, tablet, and a smartphone, is available at NT$2,190 ($66) in Taiwan, a sharp drop compared with the buyout price of NT$4,790 ($144) for the Office 2016 Home retail version, which can only be installed on one PC.
Office 365 is a subscription-based plan that offers word processing functionality on the cloud, combining the features of the desktop version and free Web apps. Users subscribed to the plan can get always-up-to-date apps for use across their devices.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in late July that Office 365 had more than 15 million subscribers worldwide, with nearly a million more signing up each month.
Satya also revealed that four out of five Fortune 500 corporations use Office 365, and 50,000 new small- and medium-sized businesses register to the service monthly.
Launched globally on Sept. 22, Office 2016 focuses on "apps that work for you, a perfect pairing with Windows 10, and security features businesses will love," Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team, wrote in a blog post.
Among the key features found in Office 2016 include real-time "co-authoring" in Word documents that lets users see what others are writing as it happens, the "Tell Me" bar that helps users find specific Office features or commands, and the "Sway" digital storytelling app for Windows 10 that creates interactive stories that can be shared with other users.
