Microsoft Corp. has announced that its Office applications for Apple iPad were downloaded more than 12 million times in just one week. At present, the Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint applications are top free apps in Apple’s AppStore. But is 12 million really a lot?

“More than 12 million downloads of Word, Excel, PPT and OneNote for iPad at AppStore,” a tweet by Microsoft Office Division reads.

Microsoft offers a full set of iPad-optimized productivity applications, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and many others. Office for iPad apps have a familiar look and feel, but are built from the ground up for iPad and touch-based input. All the Office apps are available for free and allow to read, view and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations. However, to create and edit documents, customers will need an Office 365 subscription (e.g., Office 365 Home Premium subscription costs $9.99 a month and $99.99 a year).

Without any doubts, 12 million downloads in the first week is a respectable number. Moreover, not a lot of applications are that popular in general; many apps are only downloaded by up to a million of customers.

Nonetheless, one should keep in mind that there are 180 – 200 million iPads in use nowadays and only about 6 per cent of iPad owners decided to try one or more Microsoft Office apps. Moreover, to find out whether the Office is actually used to create on iPad, one would need to know how many Office 365 subscriptions Microsoft sold in the first week of Office for iPad availability and how many subscriptions it sells normally. Apparently, Microsoft does not really want to disclose that number.

”We are extremely pleased with the Office for iPad interest we have seen from consumers and business alike,” a statement by Microsoft reads. “We have no additional details to share.”

KitGuru Says: Looks like thanks to Pages, Numbers, Keynote and other apps from Apple that come for free with new iPads and iPhones, many customers simply do not need Office programs from Microsoft. Meanwhile, those, who have used iPad for some time, probably already own productivity applications they need.

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