Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium service clocks 1 million users

Microsoft has announced that its Office 365 Home Premium service has clocked 1 million subscribers since the time of its launch.

This makes the new iteration of Office the best-selling Office edition yet, with more than one sold every second on average in the last three and a half months. However, it's worth pointing out that these new Office sales figures are for sales to organisations and individuals. Organisations often buy multiple editions of software.

The service becomes one of the few services to reach the one million user mark in such a short span of time, trailing only behind Instagram which reached the one million user mark in two and a half months.

Microsoft had launched Office365 Home Premium at the end of January. The Office 365 Home Premium service includes Office applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access, 20 GB of SkyDrive cloud storage, and future updates.

It's the first time that the Redmond giant is offering Office as an online subscription service, a departure from Microsoft's traditional approach of granting permission to install Office on solitary machines for a one-time fee.

Users can pay an annual or monthly charge, and get a license to use Office across five PCs or Macs and five mobile devices (official Office apps are only available for Windows Phone and some Symbian devices, at the moment). This essentially means that after subscribing to the Office 365 service, a user can install the office suite on five PCs or Macs. The user will also be able to create and edit documents via Microsoft's web-apps for the office suite, and sync documents in the cloud.

In India, the Office suite is available for purchase at an annual subscription of Rs. 4,199. Microsoft is also offering a 30 day free trial to users, although they'll have to submit their Credit Card details to the company, at the time of signing-up, and will have to manually cancel their subscription before the trial expires.