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.)
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