Microsoft’s New Office App, Sway, Is Now Open To Everyone

Microsoft’s Sway, an online tool for creating presentation documents, is now generally available to the public. Previously, a waiting list was in place.

That Sway has taken down its rope line isn’t surprising. What is perhaps slightly unexpected are the metrics that Microsoft announced in its blog post concerning the product’s availability.

Here’s the company:

It’s been only 10 weeks since we kicked off Sway Preview, and we’ve already had over one million unique visitors to Sway.com and over 175,000 requests to join, and those numbers grow by thousands daily.

Ten weeks is 70 days, implying that Sway has seen around 14,285 hits and 2,500 signups per day, so far, on average. The actual count on the traffic side of things is slightly higher, but as Microsoft only specified “over one million,” we can’t be more precise.

I would have had no guess what sort of traffic a product like Sway could attract. It’s from a large company, so that was an advantage. But being placed behind a wait list likely detracted both traffic and signups, at least until now.

(Microsoft, please keep the numbers coming.)

Sway is an interesting product given that it doesn’t have traditional files, like the original Office suite. So it was built for the cloud. Microsoft, of course, is working to convert Office into a cloud product that it can sell on a recurring basis via subscriptions. We’ll see how well it does.

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