Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium Cloud Offers Rare Pay Off

The 'delta' or the speed of change has become an increasingly valued measure of performance. As a culture, we enshrined zero-to-sixty  for cars and path-to-profitability for tech start ups as useful indicators of power. There are many others for different products and professions.

An interesting new test of the efficacy of user buy-in is time to reach one million subscribers. It is no longer enough to simply announce the size and scale of an enterprise's reach and scale. The numbers have become mind-boggling with anything less than hundreds or millions or billions beneath serious consideration.

So it is fascinating to see that Microsoft, rather desperate of late for any sort of good news, let alone some that conveys notions of popular acceptance let alone embrace, has a positive development of this sort to share.

What makes the Office 365 information particularly interesting is that most of the comparisons it draws are with free services, while Microsoft charges for the Home Premium service it offers. The question it raises is whether it signifies something more significant than curiosity or corporate tie-ins with existing products (of of which Microsoft may have provided to favored customers without charge or at discount). The implication, if the answer to the question is yes, this is meaningful, is that contrary to its reputation and recent behavior, the company is listening and learning, which would be quite a cultural change and a potential sign that even organization's dismissed as irrelevant, have resources and abilities that others would be unwise to overlook. JL

Sean Ludwig reports in Venture Beat:

Microsoft’s decision to aggressively push its flagship Office software into the cloud looks like a smart move now that Office 365 Home Premium has passed 1 million subscribers.

“The new Office is officially the best-selling Office edition yet, with more than one sold every second on average since it launched,” Microsoft said in a blog post today. “And if that wasn’t enough, in just over 100 days, you’ve made Office 365 Home Premium a hit with more than 1 million subscribers, putting it on pace with some of the most popular services around.”
Office 365 Home Premium launched in late January, and we thought it was well-thought-out product that was actually worth its $100-a-year price.
Unlike previous versions of Office, which were sold on discs and mostly didn’t care about web connectivity, the latest version of Office 365 integrates heavily with web and cloud services like SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service. You can still buy Microsoft Office 2013 on disk, but you get a lot more features with Office 365. (Microsoft also has a killer deal for students who might want to use Office 365.)
Office 365 Home Premium gives you acces to the Office apps you likely know well (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access) and you can install it on five devices. On top of getting those programs, you also get “Office on Demand,” which lets you use a cloud-based copy of Office programs on any Windows 7 or 8 PC without actually installing those programs.