The tech giant is hoping to sweeten the deal of the smartphone and the application suite with a new bundle.
In what appears to be a move to try to drive more smartphone sales, Microsoft is adding free software including a year of the Office 365 suite, to people who purchase either of two Lumia smartphone models.
The two models that will include a free subscription to the app suite are: Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL.
The two are being bundled together so that anyone who purchases one of those two smartphone models will be able to receive a year of Office 365 for free. Among the apps that are included in the suite are Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Typically, subscribing to these apps for a year would cost the user $70. This isn’t the first time this type of offer has been made by Microsoft in order to drive sales of the devices. Last year, a similar bundle was offered when the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL devices were purchased.
Beyond the free year of Office 365 subscription, it also includes a terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage for a year.
Anyone who has purchased a Lumia 950 or Lumia 950 XL between November 20, 2015 right through to June 30, 2016 will be able to take advantage of this deal, provided the devices are registered within that time frame. The offer is being made to consumers in the United States, as well as those in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France and the United Kingdom.
These models will also be sold with a free Microsoft Display Dock when an unlocked version of the smartphone is purchased. That offer, however, runs only until the end of January, while supplies last (whichever is sooner). The use of the Display Dock, while Continuum technology enabled, allows users to be able to use their smartphones to work on their Office based documents.
The Lumia 950 isn’t new to Microsoft incentives to try to boost the sales. While the Office 365 bundle is the most recent, the devices were also sold with a $50 discount offer last fall.
The company is hoping to win over device owners with a spectrum of Android and Apple compatible applications.
Microsoft has been releasing a range of different mobile apps that are compatible with Android and Apple iOS operating systems in order to help to draw the attention and usage of those device users.
The company has been acquiring startups to help to give its own mobile application offerings a boost.
For example, Microsoft recently purchased a tech startup from Germany called 6Wunderlkinder. Now, it is able to offer mobile apps that compete with some of the core applications that had previously been used on other operating systems. For example the Keep app on Android or the Reminders application on Apple now has competition through the Wunderlist that was created by the newly acquired company.
That is only one example of several moves that Microsoft is making in order to draw users for its mobile apps.
At the same time, the company continues to promote its own Windows operating system for mobile devices. That said, in the grand scheme of things, the number of consumers who are actually purchasing devices based on that OS are quite low compared to the number of people who are using Android and iOS based gadgets. Therefore, the company is ensuring that it will be able to appeal to a larger market by ensuring that its smartphone apps will run on the most popular platforms and not just its own.
The offerings from Microsoft include its Office programs for Android and iOS, which it created itself and released earlier in 2015. That said, it also has a calendar application called Sunrise, which was developed by a company that was purchased by the tech giant back in February. For its email application, it uses Accompli, which was the result of a purchase of another startup.
So far, the mobile apps that Microsoft has been offering – including its own and those developed by startups that it has acquired – have been receiving considerable praise from tech reviewers. It could be that the company may be starting to redefining its niche within the new device marketplace.
