That may be true, but it's difficult to separate that out from the other things that happened at the same time. They also started a cloud service for users and

That may be true, but it's difficult to separate that out from the other things that happened at the same time. They also started a cloud service for users and offered discounts on subscriptions. Who's to say that it wouldn't have worked out just as well if they made the cloud service and offered discounts on boxed copies of the software? Unfortunately, you can't do the experiment twice.