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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.)
We're getting our 50 users off it. With the non-stop "Service" messages and the intrusive bullshit it keeps trying to push it has turned into a sinkhole.
For example, Outlook users get prompted to install a NFL calendar add-on to follow football season. When I called support they first told me it must be a malware we picked up somewhere. After getting even more irate they told me "oh, well, yes, we do push that and you can't turn those messages off".
Utter bullshit.
The MS Office hegemony is still strong and is still making MS a lot of money.
May be true in the good ol' US of A but over in the EU, they're going full-steam ahead with switching from Microsoft Windows and Office to Ubuntu and LibreOffice (There's a draft directive to switch to free and open source IT solutions). Since governments and govt. agencies are Microsoft's main paying customers, then Microsoft are going downhill in a very large market. It's just a matter of how long it takes for the EU to drop Microsoft entirely.
Need LibreOffice online? LibreOffice 3.5 can be installed on a server and will work in a web browser. Need a supported commercial solution? Check out Collabora and the many spin-off service providers.