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Microsoft Reports New Subscribers For Office 365 Plunged 62% (itworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Microsoft is having trouble selling $7-a-month subscriptions to Office 365. In the last three months of 2016, Microsoft added just 900,000 new subscriptions -- and throughout all of 2016, subscriptions increased by just 4.3 million. In fact, a chart at IT World shows that new subscriptions actually peaked in a year ago, with a steady decline in new subscribers ever since. "In each of the last three quarters, Office 365 grew by about 900,000 subscribers, the smallest quarterly increase since early 2014," they write. "Prior to the nine-month stretch of 2016, subscribers were accumulating at rates two to three times larger per quarter."
This explains why Microsoft announced 97 new markets for the software nine weeks ago. So far after four years, Microsoft's found just 25 million subscribers for Office 365 -- and it's not clear how many of those came from their $100 five-user packages. (Although those figures suggest that Office 365 subscriptions are still earning Microsoft at least half a billion dollars a year.)
This explains why Microsoft announced 97 new markets for the software nine weeks ago. So far after four years, Microsoft's found just 25 million subscribers for Office 365 -- and it's not clear how many of those came from their $100 five-user packages. (Although those figures suggest that Office 365 subscriptions are still earning Microsoft at least half a billion dollars a year.)
As if any company would change their policies after a few days of downtime.
Many companies run their business on Outlook, Word, and Excel, which is why you see it installed on almost every end-user system. Put another way, shut off the internet and see what happens to the ISP contract after "a few days of downtime".
Here's an investor presentation from last week (PDF). It's a long document, but the following is mostly derived from a couple of slides at the bottom of page 3.
It looks like their total revenues for Creative Cloud dipped a few percent and then recovered again over the period 2012-2015, and as of 2016 their annual recurring revenue for that area is up to around $3.5B, compared to annual revenue of around $2.5B back in 2012 when their subscription model was starting up.
Over the same four-year window, it appears that their subscription ARR has been increasing roughly linearly, while their non-subscription revenues are fast approaching zero.
In short, it looks like they are now better off than they were four years ago in terms of annual Creative Cloud revenue, by about 40% if they maintain their current subscription level.
Another figure they mention is current year-on-year subscription growth of 46% outside the US. However, they are deafeningly quiet on what proportion of their overall market that represents or the equivalent figure for US customers. Their overall growth rate is clearly far less than that, so it could be that they're successfully expanding into foreign markets and that's helping to drive their overall subscription growth (probably a good thing for Adobe) but it could also be that sales in foreign markets are covering up a significant reduction in the US as increasing numbers of US customers are cancelling their subscriptions (probably a bad thing for Adobe).
It's also difficult to tell how many subscribers they actually have, since there doesn't seem to be any breakdown of which of the available subscription plans are generating how much revenue or what sort of effects they see from volume licensing, subscribers from different countries, or subscribers paying in different currencies. If we guess an average subscriber is worth about US$500 per year to them in revenues, that would give them around 7 million current subscribers, but this could obviously be way off if say most of the revenues are actually from enterprise customers paying far less than the headline per-seat prices with their volume deals.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For context, I work at a large multinational not based in the US.
We have different approval requirements for capital expenditure versus operating expenses (and in my country, different tax treatments as well). It may be easier for the person responsible for procurement to order a recurring monthly expense than justify a capex spend, especially if the monthly spend is below an approval threshold. It may even be cheaper given the paperwork required.
The law firm where I was the IT manager asked about Google Docs.
Appreciate that I've been retired 2 years now and I'm losing my tech savvy as each month goes by, so my remarks apply to about three years ago:
We had a Microsoft Office site license and the program itself was "on the ground," installed on the server (Exchange) and on each desktop.
I pointed out that because Google Docs was free, there could be no explicit or implied guarantees or warranties regarding up time or backups.
Also, "cloud-based," was equivalent to "hackable."
Because the Firm DID expressly, and implicitly, guarantee privacy, and indeed was bound to protect client and court information according to law, Google Docs was not a solution I could get behind.
To this day, they have opted to store all that stuff locally with no part of that data facing the Internet.
I think it was a good call.
I do not know (or care, now) if Google Docs has a subscription service that would ease minds about those concerns.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Google Docs is another reason. Google Docs doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it is "good enough" for most people. Instead of $7 per user per month, it is $0 per month. Google Docs also has less downtime.
We switched from Microsoft Office to Open Office a few years ago and no one even blinked. I'm not sure most of the people even realize that it changed. Most of them still refer to the spreadsheet as excel when asking a question.
Add to your list of people, the ones like me who purchased Office 2010 for Windows many years ago, purchased some version of Office for Mac a few years ago (2012 maybe?) and are completely satisfied with the features available. I have no reason to buy Office as a subscription because I already have almost everything of any use that it can do. The costs I paid are amortized for as long as I keep using the software, which at this rate is likely to be more than ten years for both packages. Before I bought 2010, for example, the previous version I bought was 97.