Just yesterday Microsoft added some brand new features in its Office 365 and stretched its reach to various countries regarding its services for handy business communication and sharing.

In a proud blog post, the Manager Andrew Kisslo commended on the fast-selling spree of Office 365 which is about eight times as fast as the previous version.

However the statistics may not be that rosy, after all, the Infoworld writer Woody Leonhard feels that maybe figures are cleverly styled to claim a high growth, but eight times of the previous product, the Business Productivity Online Suite or BPOS is still quite slow.

“There’s no indication as to how many employee seats are licensed, so we’re still very much in the dark about the total number of active Office 365 users,” he wrote.

Although in contrast to the mistrust, Microsoft has actually disclosed the sales figures for Office 365 and not just this time but in September as as well at the company’s annual meeting for financial analysts.

The same was pointed out by Rob Helm at Directions on Microsoft on his Twitter account that the Microsoft COO Kevin Turner informed analysts, “We just launched that product not that long ago, and we have over five million seats already signed up, and we’ve deployed around 2.8 million already.”

But that was on September 14 and as we all are aware of Office 365 was made available publicly at the end of June.

So is the latest development of selling over five million seats and near about three million users in just about two and a half months is good enough?

Well the answer depends on the reference scale. One of its most important competitor, Google Apps registered the sale to four million businesses and forty million active users in its total span of near about five years now. Thus on a comparative basis, Microsoft is doing pretty good.