This "single business product" has been dominant enterprise and small bussiness tech for 30+ years. 300M isn't that impressive given this. And it's not something users seek and opt, it's something business demands and buy in bulk for them. Plus it's losing ground, replaced by other SaaS.

Whereas Apple built their 700M from nowhere (near bankcrupt sub-2% market share in 1997, starting building their subscription offering past 2007, and more seriously, past 2012 or so).

Office isn't "cool" or anything, but people definitely seek it out. No competitor comes close to Excel, Word, or PowerPoint right now.

Don't they? For 99% of what people do, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and LibreOffice equivalents will do just fine. Heck, Google Docs will do just fine.

For PowerPoint and Excel, I strongly disagree. People do horrific things with Excel that I think are far beyond its intended usage, but they love it for that. You can't pry Excel away from people in finance and a lot of quantitative/non-programmer roles.

Word is more debatable. Yes, if you use it just for taking notes or something, the alternatives are fine.

But if you want to make a nice-looking document, Word is still just a lot better. I've never seen a fantastic Google Doc, for example, even that my company's designers have worked on.

And LibreOffice is another, older generation of UI/UX that is far behind Office at this point.

Indeed, "alone". What else do they have? Skype? Teams? Both part of Office 365. XBox GamePass? 23 Million.

300M is impressive, but we are missing the point here. Most of that count comes from involuntary herd signups by their enterprise customers. What Apple has done is impressive, (although they have equally questionable ways to retain customers). I am sure that at any point, a sizable chunk of Apple's 700M pie would be trial users, but still, it is a considerable number.

But Office is something businesses have been paying for for 30 years. These Apple services have launched in the last 10 years. It's meteoric growth.

Everyone seems to miss that. Office was the original subscription for all intents and purposes, and with platform pricing in EAs, it was and is almost impossible to get rid of it.

> a single business product

There is no program called Office.exe. Microsoft Office is not a single business product; it is a suite of products.

Can you even buy a standalone copy of Word or Excel anymore? You can't subscribe to them individually and you can't buy them individually so what does it matter if there is 5 *.exes or 1?

Which is not really relevant or interesting.

A product is not necessarily a program (an executable).

A suite can be a product too, and you can absolutely sell a suite as a single SKU.

In fact that's exactly what MS does 90% of the time, and it even used to sell it in shrink-wrapped box form.

And that's what Apple's subscription is selling too. So it doesn't make sense to say Microsoft's offering is a "single product" and Apple's is "a range of consumer offerings".

Well, Apple doesn't have a single subscription, they have several in totally unrelated areas (from Music to AppleCare, and from renewing your Iphone model every year leasing-style to Cloud backup). They do offer bundles for some, but not for others.