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.
This new milestone has suggested that the company’s strategy to cross platforms is a successful one.
According to the latest download figures, Microsoft Office apps have now been downloaded over 100 million times, which has indicated that despite a great deal of controversy surrounding the cross platform strategy that the company has adopted, it is paying off.
The suite of apps has been made available to users of Android, iOS and recently Windows Phone based devices.
The software and technology giant held its third quarter earnings call, last week, and revealed that its Microsoft Office apps have been doing very well on the operating systems of its rivals, Google and Apple. “We are clearly taking Office everywhere” explained the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, as it described the rapidly growing popularity of the suite of applications.
He went on to state that “Core to our mobile first strategy is to ensure that our service end points are on every mobile device, and to that end we have seen continued momentum with more than 100 million downloads of Office on iPhones, iPads, and Android tablets.”
Nadella pointed out that the cross platform versions of the Microsoft Office apps is only the start.
He also discussed the recent release of Outlook mobile apps on the Android and iOS platforms which occurred in the second quarter of this year. Moreover, Nadella also said that the company is making updates to its OneDrive applications and that said that there would very soon be a preview of an upcoming version of the Office software suite that has been designed for Mac computers. This, he said, means that the Office service is now being made available to users on more devices than ever before.
This represents considerable achievements for Microsoft, since the rise in use of Microsoft Office apps has also meant that there has been a notable increase in the subscriptions to Office 365. According to the figures cited by Nadella, that service is now seeing an average of 1 million new customers every month and that the company now has over 12 million subscribers to that service. That represents a very healthy growth of 35 percent over what it had been in the quarter before.
