Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Reports Record Revenue
jones_supa sends this AFP report:
"Microsoft soared to record revenues in the last quarter, confounding Wall Street forecasts on the back of strong demand for Xbox consoles, Surface tablets and Internet cloud services. The U.S.-based technology titan reported net income of $6.56 billion on revenue that hit a record high of $24.52 billion in the quarter that ended December 31. ... Sales of Surface tablets more than doubled from the previous quarter to hit $893 million, and Microsoft sold 7.4 million Xbox videogame consoles, with 3.9 million of those being new-generation Xbox One.
Bing's share of the Internet search market grew to 18.2 percent while its share of the online search ad market grew about a third, according to Microsoft. Meanwhile, money made from selling Windows software to computer makers slid by three percent due to continue soft demand by consumers for personal computers, according to Microsoft."
Imagine what these numbers would be if they actually knew what the fuck they were doing.
So this means the price of their software is gonna come down... right? :P
Looks like for microsoft to preserve profitability it may have to continue to branch out of its core competency, windows. Perhaps it's following in Apples footsteps in a sense, branching away from personal computing to consumer electronics.
That billion dollar write-off on the Surface tablets doesn't seem so bad now does it...
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I pay you a dollar for every 90 cents you give me !!
Surface COGS: 935 m
Revenue 850 m
Meanwhile, money made from selling Windows software to computer makers slid by three percent due to continue soft demand by consumers for personal computers
Yes, I too have been both softly demanding and loudly demanding a personal computer OS from Microsoft, yet all they want to push is some tablet OS unsuited for business work on a personal computer.
At least they aren't acting surprised about their choice.
That reads almost too much like a sales pitch/shill post.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Hope they don't announce big profit now and come back a few months later with a big charge for something else. Sort of like Bush would not include war costs in regular budget and always ask for emergency appropriations for a war that had been going on for years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The year of the death of the linux desktop :-(
Their heart was in the right place by trying to make one unified interface to help them in the mobile business, but it's just an epic fail.
How can it be right to push for a fundamentally flawed idea?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Too bad you used IE to post this or you would have spelled rumor correctly in the title.
It's always good to hear that the world's largest software firm has a higher revenue than the world's largest advertisement firm.
Regardless of whether it is MS or not.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
We have recently purchased a Surface to test with some LIMS software we use, which currently runs fine on W7. We were told it wouldn't run on 8. It has been discovered that it does in fact run on 8 and runs fine on our Surface. We are going to to test using Surface tablets running 8.1 in our environment. So far so good.
Are we running this on iPads or Android tablets? No.
Why?
Because the software in question, along with pretty much everything else we use is designed to run on either Windows or Linux.
I could draw a conclusion here that Surface tablets will make in roads into the Enterprise for exactly this reason. Yes, yes, I know there are thousands of iPads in Enterprises right now, with all manner of executive and administrative staffers trying to look important at work with their tablet, while busily updating their FB status. However, I feel that because of MS's entrenched position in the Enterprise the Surface is more of a "work" device than an iPad or Android tablet.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
> I'm a .NET developer so I'm a Fanboy because nothing else comes close for enterprise development.
Wow. That's a real head-shaker.
...Steve
I know, I didn't throw in enough mindless "Micro$hafts" or invoke Clippy enough. I'll try harder next time.
I'm a .NET developer so I'm a Fanboy because nothing else comes close for enterprise development.
You're fanboy for the wrong reasons. Microsoft is the classic bully. They take a standard and change it enough to be a pain in the ass for everyone else to integrate with. Then you have to explain to management that MS is doing something a little different that causes problems. Inevitably, a fanboy like yourself will pipe up and say that if everything were Microsoft, we wouldn't have this problem, when in fact because things are Microsoft, we have the problem.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but my experience is that most people who program using MS tools are clueless. Not because their stupid, but because Microsoft makes all the decisions for them. Web services aren't a good idea until MS came out with the VS Web Service Wizard.
There's a reason Microsoft's address is One Microsoft Way.
You could always bring back the Windows 7 Start menu by installing Classic Shell into Windows 8.x.
They would have been able to buy their own country if Windows 8 wasn't such a disaster.
You make a compelling argument, and I find it hard to disagree with you.
I would only point out two broad areas where Microsoft seems to be a little weaker than some of its big competitors: innovation and quality control.
And I'm finding it hard to make a case for innovation. I could argue that they don't come up with new ideas, they borrow ideas that already work for someone else, but that's not really a sin in my book. Who was it that said "good artists borrow from other artists, great artists steal?" I could argue that they won't jump ahead of the curve--won't release new products until they're assured of success, but witness the Zune and Metro. So let's grant them innovation.
The quality control thing is embarrassing. The culture at MS seems to be that the general public is their beta test group. I think they released Vista so that all their other releases would shine by comparison (not really; it was an unintended benefit). I work around half a dozen bugs in MS products on a daily basis. Using their software has trained me not to trust software.
I'm not really sure how many epic fails a great software company gets before we have to call it mediocre. If they didn't have a strangle hold on OEMs and enterprise movers and shakers, I doubt they would have more than a 10% share of the desktop. On the other hand, if they didn't have that strangle hold, they wouldn't have such license to release buggy code. They are victims of their own success.
If you choose Japanese, you need to install SQR Server 2008.
A simple example of why this is wrong: Let's say you have a simple Yes/No question to ask. For tablets, the right thing to do is blank out the screen, put the question more-or-less in the middle, with two large icons to poke. For desktops, it's a standard Yes/No dialog box. For phones, you're better off with the question across the top, and then the Yes and No buttons taking up almost the entire screen.
That's 3 different interfaces with 3 different interactions that are easy to pull off because you're interacting with different kinds of objects. Trying to make them all the same is so monumentally and obviously stupid I'm at a loss for why attempting to do so is all the rage in the UI design world (I'm looking at you too, Gnome3 and Unity). My best guess is that UI designers are working feverishly on it because it's one of the few areas of their field where there isn't a pretty clear understanding of what the Right Thing is, and so that's where they can get creative and innovative (and ideally rich if they find a really really good idea and patent it).
Anyone here working in UI design that might be able to explain it better to me?
I am officially gone from
(removes glasses, pinches bridge of nose, wonders why he's been coming to this fucking site every couple days for 20 years now...)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I find it extremely hard to believe that a company whom has failed on so many fronts can post a "record revenue". Let's face it; Windows Phone, Vista, Metro, Xbox One -- all have been either utter failures or fell seriously short of expected sales. If a company can produce "record revenue" from a year like that, then management has problems bigger than just Ballmer.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
ActiveX was not a good idea.
Yup, http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
I don't mean to be a jerk either but frankly most of the people who bash MS in the developer arena don't know what they're talking about. I've done a _lot_ of UNIX development in bash, Perl, C, Java, and other languages. And I've also done a shit-ton of development in .NET. I know what I'm talking about in both arenas. Most UNIX guys don't have the slightest concept of how to develop in or support Windows in a professional environment. It would befuddle them to think you can do more with Powershell than you can with Bash.
The "standards!! embrace extend extiguish!" meme largely came about because of MS's (mis)adventures in trying to corner the web browser market. Generally MS is very good about e.g. web service standards. I support an app that has a .NET web service with Kerberos authentication and a Java CLI that supports single-sign on access to that service via Kerberos. And it all works pretty well because of _standards_. Granted, nothing but Java in the UNIX space has advanced far enough past 2001 to support this sort of scenario, but Java's fine.
And ultimately, developing in a corporation, I don't give a shit about standards beyond what they let me actually get accomplished. It's meaningless unless it gets in my way. If .NET and Jax-WS/Metro didn't play well together, for example, I'd have an issue.
Taking in money doesn't necessarily mean anything unless you can actually make money.
$6.66 billion net. $24.52 billion gross.
No, Java's the only other real contender for modern "enterprise" software (the backend - much of the JS on the client sadly comes from Java libraries). I've spent years writing code in both Java and C#, and these days C# wins hands down.
For years they were leapfrogging one another - whichever language had the most recent major release was a bit better, but not enough to really matter. But Java hit the rocks a few years back and has been sinking ever since. It had stumbled before Oracle, when C# got modern list processing with LINQ and a lambda operator, and Java missed the boat. And with the death of Sun, they never recovered.
The single biggest missing piece for C# right now is the lack of official support for writing Android apps in C#/Visual Studio. There are commercial solutions for that, but without official blessing it lacks the power of "no one has ever been fired for buying IBM". Maybe the new bosses at MS can get wise to that - it's not like they don't make money off of Android sales.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not in a corporate environment you sure as hell don't! It's one Windows Update way from being broken (or intentionally disabled).
I've even see Classic Shell lock up a laptop with a secondary monitor. Unless it's native, you don't modify core OS behavior in a corporate environment that's not officially supported. Even if it was supported, best-practice would be not to do it anyways to ensure broad app and environmental compatibility.
Hopefully Win9 will combine the GUI of Win7 with the engine of Win8. Hopefully...
Life is not for the lazy.
Considering how many "fans" of Windows 8 were eventually found to be working for Microsoft's PR firms, it's a fair assumption. They are still doing it too...see recent news about the whole Machinima debacle. If you AREN'T paid, I have to ask, why so loyal? It truly is a crap product, why so defensive?
I've got enough trouble dealing with standard SD cards in my camera and the only Micro-SD I have to deal with is so small I'm afraid my dog will swallow the damn thing if I drop it on the floor. Human Factor idiots. Not all of us have the small hands of a child so a standard SD slot makes far more sense.
At this very moment I am busily searching for a MicroSD card in my rug. The damned thing popped out of a Samsung tablet. I wish my dog had found it, at least I would be able to eventually recover it.
If I find the damned thing, it's getting painted international orange.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!