There are a million reasons to love Microsoft, but perhaps the most convincing one is that Microsoft just keeps working to make sure that more people can be productive more of the time.
According to Microsoft’s earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017, that noble ambition has been hitting its mark, as per the usual. These latest numbers show that revenue from Office consumer products has gone up 8% since last year, bringing the number of active subscribers up to 24 million. Commercial Office 365 tools have seen quite a bit more growth, going up 51% and bringing the number of monthly active users to over 85 million.
The growth for consumer Office 365 was mostly driven by recurring subscription revenue, whereas the Commercial side of things was driven by Office 365 commercial seats, which grew by 40%. Revenue from the sale of Office commercial products has gone down by 14% from last year, but this seems to come from “continued adoption of cloud offerings by customers.” There is little of splitting hairs here – Office did very well for itself this quarter.
