Microsoft's Word for iPad cracks top 10 in gross revenue

Computerworld - Microsoft's new Word for iPad app has cracked the top 10 on Apple's App Store "Top Grossing" chart.

The app, which was released March 27, was in the No. 6 spot on the U.S. App Store's chart Sunday. The other Office for iPad apps, Excel and PowerPoint, held No. 11 and No. 32, respectively.
As of early Monday, those rankings had slipped slightly, to No. 8 (Word), No. 16 (Excel) and No. 40 (PowerPoint).
Apple does not publicly disclose the dollar amounts that apps for its iPad gross, but simply ranks them. Only Apple and the app developer knows the exact amount of revenue generated by any specific app.
Although Microsoft made its Office for iPad apps free to download for viewing documents, to edit existing or create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations, customers must subscribe to an Office 365 software rent-not-own plan. Those plans can be obtained through a number of non-App Store outlets:
Consumers, for example, can purchase a subscription from Microsoft's website or at retail, while businesses can obtain Office 365 from Microsoft directly or from one of its channel partners.
But Apple's tally of gross sales considers only those through its App Store, either as pre-paid apps and in-app purchases. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft offers an in-app purchase of Office 365 Home, a $99.99 consumer-grade plan that allows subscribers to install the desktop Office on up to five Windows PCs or Macs, as well as use the suite on up to five tablets.
It was those in-app purchases of Office 365 Home, which were charged to customers' iTunes accounts, that Apple calculated when it ranked the apps in its Top Grossing chart.
Without a gross revenue figure, it is impossible to estimate the number of customers who used in-app purchase to buy an Office 365 Home subscription, or calculate how much Apple retained as its 30% commission of all app sales and in-app revenue.
Apple will continue to take its cut from those subscriptions in upcoming years, as the Office 365 Home plans purchased from within a Microsoft app will be "automatically renew[ed] within 24 hours prior to the end of the current subscription period" and again charged to the customer's iTunes account.