When I asked Microsoft officials for clarification today, I was told (again) that the company isn't divulging sales figures for Office 365. Given Microsoft only launched the product in late June, I wondered whether these were all paid seats.
2: Matt Rosoff at Business Insider noted on November 30 that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner claimed Microsoft had 'over 5 million seats signed up' for Office 365 as of September. Update: I asked again for more detailed sales figures and was told by a spokesperson: 'We are not breaking out the figures, but we can say that Office 365 and BPOS have millions of paid users, and that number is growing substantially.' (Microsoft officials also touted Office 365 growth during the company's latest earnings call, but, again, declined to provide actual sales figures.)
But no one at the company is willing to share actual user purchase numbers. In today's press release, Microsoft also claimed that users are adopting Office 365 eight times faster than they did BPOS, the Business Productivity Online Suite bundle that was the predecessor to Office 365. But on November 29, the company did release a bit of new information about its user base, claiming that 'more than 90 percent' of early Office 365 adopters are small-business users. Microsoft still isn't sharing publicly the number of Office 365 subscriptions it has sold since it launched its cloud-hosted service bundle in late June of this year.
