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Microsoft's Cloud Bet Continues To Pay Off In Latest Earnings (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the slow-and-steady dept.

In its 2018 financial results, Microsoft reported revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion. "Revenue has jumped 12 percent year-over-year during the holiday quarter, and the trend of Microsoft's success with the cloud has continued," reports The Verge. "This time around, Azure revenue has increased by a massive 98 percent." From the report: Overall server and cloud services revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year, alongside the massive 98 percent jump in Azure revenue. It's clear Microsoft's future growth and revenue opportunities are with the cloud, so it's no surprise to see the company continually investing there to be competitive with Amazon. Microsoft's Office 365 subscription bet for consumers is also paying off. 29.2 million people are now using Office 365 on the consumer side, with revenue increasing 12 percent year-over-year for Office consumer and cloud. On the commercial side, Office revenue is also up at a 10 percent increase since the same period last year.

63 comments

  1. Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think the 1% Surface line increase begs to question how long Microsoft will continue to develop this line. When you look at OEM Windows too its not the revenue provider it once was. I know Windows continues to help Microsoft sell other services, but with the Surface I think its getting harder to claim this hardware venture as a success.

    1. Re:Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      it may not have grown much but in the current market that is actually bloody good where competitors saw decreases. something like the surface is never going to be a constant growth, it is a solid revenue earner

    2. Re:Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how the hell is 1% GROWTH a bad number. While it is not amazing it is an ok result as it is coming off repeatedly good numbers.

    3. Re:Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by gravewax · · Score: 1

      yeah they must be truly panicking with only 1.3 billion revenue from surface devices a quarter, better bail on a hugely profitable business because it isn't in fast growth mode, what a disaster.

    4. Re:Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I guess with that same logic Apple must be about to cancel the iPhone and the ipad etc should have been canned long ago.

    5. Re: Yep, but Surface line was basically flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't worry, Microsoft hardware will NEVER go away and die, ever.

      Sent from my Windows Phone.

  2. Azure is fine, but... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

    How does one pronounce "azure"? I've heard AHZ-uhr, ey-ZUHR, Escher, as-YURE and a few others...

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    1. Re:Azure is fine, but... by xpiotr · · Score: 3, Funny

      How does one pronounce "azure"? I've heard AHZ-uhr, ey-ZUHR, Escher, as-YURE and a few others...

      You pronounce it like the French Riviera, The Côte d'Azur
      (French pronunciation: [kot dazy]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      Might require some wine before attempting.
      Recommend eating cheese just to be safe.

    2. Re:Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The French U, like the German Ü, is a sound americans can't pronounce. But they insist on using words that contain them and just sound stupid doing it.

    3. Re:Azure is fine, but... by asylumx · · Score: 1

      pronounce the A like the A in "apple" the 'juhr'.

    4. Re: Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you zure?

    5. Re:Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No there's no J in the word. It's like people who pronounce negotiations "neh-go-see-ashuns", nowhere in that word is a s or c or anything like that. Or pronouncing parmesan as "parma-john". Just no.

    6. Re:Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How does one pronounce "azure"?

      Presumably it's pronounced like the color

    7. Re:Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Europeans and "insider" Microsofties and MVP types pronounce it with the accent on the second syllable.

      The rest of us pronounce it with the accent on the first syllable.

    8. Re:Azure is fine, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft marketing and sales staff pronounce it like "Azshar", which sounds completely retarded.

      The correct way is impossible to find on youtube amongst all the American robovoice pronunciation and MS marketing videos, elongates the u and the e, similar to the French pronunciation. The word came into English from French and Latin.

  3. Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MSFT stock has been a good bet indeed since Steve took his chair and left.

  4. Net income? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "In its 2018 financial results, Microsoft reported revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion."

    According to the article:

    "GAAP net loss was $(6.3) billion"

    Operating income is different from net income.

    1. Re:Net income? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      its a net loss due to a one time hit due to the tax changes. basically bringing money back into the country has a tax cost. So while that makes it a net loss on paper for the quarter it isn't really relevant to the health of their business

    2. Re:Net income? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Apple also paid a one time $38 billion tax bill to bring overseas money back into the country. Where it will employ people and generate profits that are taxed

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

      It's almost like reducing corporate tax rates increases economic activity and future tax revenues or something.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    3. Re:Net income? by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Really? Wow. How do you know what Apple is going to do with the billions they brought back into the company? Maybe they will just keep it, or spend it on gold plated Ferraris. You must be on the Board to know that they are going to use it to employ people and generate taxable profits.

    4. Re:Net income? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

      They paid the $38 billion so they could bring offshore money back to the US where they intend to create 20,000 jobs. They'll spend $30 billion over five years doing it

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

      Apple Inc. said it will bring hundreds of billions of overseas dollars back to the U.S., pay about $38 billion in taxes on the money and spend tens of billions on domestic jobs, manufacturing and data centers in the coming years.

      The iPhone maker plans capital expenditures of $30 billion in the U.S. over five years and will create 20,000 new jobs at existing sites and a new campus it intends to open. The Cupertino, California-based company's shares rose 1.7 percent to a record closing price of $179.10.

      and if you look further down the total expenditure is much larger - around $200 billion

      Apple has the largest offshore cash reserves of any U.S. company, with about $252 billion at the end of September, the most recently reported fiscal quarter. The tax rate indicates that Apple is likely bringing back a majority of its overseas cash back to the U.S., leaving only a small portion for international investments like retail stores.

      "They're going to have well over $200 billion by the end of this year that will be available for incremental investments, capital returns and M&A," said Matthew Kanterman, a New York-based Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. The new tax law lets U.S. companies bring overseas cash reserves back home in one year and pay the resulting tax bill over eight years. "And Apple hasn't historically done big M&A," he said.

      Five-Year Spending Plan

      The $30 billion in capital expenditures will come as part of $350 billion that Apple expects to spend in the U.S. over the next five years. The 20,000 new jobs include additional Apple employees at its campuses, data centers, and retail stores, but not third-party developers for iPhone and Mac apps, an economy Apple has touted in the past.

      Apple said that part of the $30 billion in capital expenditures will go toward a new U.S.-based campus, new data centers and additional supplier investments. The company, which opened a new headquarters in Cupertino last year, said its new U.S. site initially will be focused on employees who provide technical support to Apple product users. The new location, which Apple said it will announce later this year, will be similar to the company's existing campus in Austin, Texas, for supply-chain and technical-support employees.

      Can This Tax Proposal Lure Companies and Cash Home?: QuickTake

      Apple said it will increase its local manufacturing fund, announced last year, from $1 billion to $5 billion, indicating that it will be sourcing more components for its products domestically. As part of the original fund, Apple invested in Corning Inc. and Finisar Corp., companies that make components for iPhone glass screens and lasers for Face ID and AirPods, respectively.

      Now as I have often pointed out Apple is not a charity but a fairly ruthless profit making entity that would slaughter its users and sell their organs if it could do so without causing expensive class action lawsuits that would make such a course of action unprofitable. It is therefore reasonable to think the Apple board expect to make substantially more than the $38 billion it lost in taxes by moving money on shore.

      If Apple wanted to leave the money dormant it could leave it offshore. They're obviously bringing the money back to the US because they think they can sweat it more there as the Bloomberg article explains.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    5. Re:Net income? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or they made a public announcement and you're a dumbass.

  5. With clouds it rains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The future is Windows 10S and Edge (no other browsers allowed) connected clouds at Microsoft, with secure boot and end of support locking out Windows 7 and Linux. You will pay for this future and like it.

    1. Re:With clouds it rains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe hire some testers first to fix that OS, so people will keep using it (and Azure)

    2. Re:With clouds it rains by subanark · · Score: 2

      You can put Linux on Azure, either choose from one of the prebuilt OS images or bring your own. Also, it is considerably cheaper to do so, as you aren't paying for Windows by the hour if you do. If you bring your own, make sure you use Microsoft's open source cloud drivers on your OS, as your performance will suck without them.

      If you want to use Windows on the cloud, you can use AWS, Google, IBM, etc... the price difference between Windows and Linux on those clouds is roughly the same.

      The primary reason Microsoft is the one that signs boot images is that no one else wanted to take up that task.

      N.B. This friendly message brought to you by an Azure performance engineer

    3. Re:With clouds it rains by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      And yet their cloud business still isn't bigger than AWS, and they still have less servers on the Internet than Linux, and secure boot still allows you to install Linux with the one-time "hassle" of disabling it (was all of three mouse clicks on a brand new Dell laptop, and you won't find a friendlier OEM to Microsoft than Dell) with no end to that policy in sight.

      Nice FUD though. I'm sure disabling Secure Boot on anything but Microsoft hardware will happen Real Soon Now (tm) and all the doom-and-gloom prognostications from people on Slashdot over the past 10 years will come true...

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  6. riya by priyash7575 · · Score: 0

    http://www.riyachaudary.com/ http://www.riyachaudary.com/ph... http://www.riyachaudary.com/do... http://www.riyachaudary.com/gu... http://www.riyachaudary.com/ab...

  7. $600 MILLION max Azure revenue vs $14 BILLION AWS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Flash back two years. Similarly vague on concrete numbers back two years ago:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-vs-aws-revenue-2016-1

    "Our server products and cloud services revenue grew $153 million or 3%, driven by revenue growth from Microsoft Azure of 127% and higher revenue from Microsoft SQL Server, offset in part by lower revenue from Windows Server.....But there's no way to tease out how much of that $5.1 billion is Azure versus the older products. "

    OK, so lets assume a max case as if *all* of the $153m growth that year was from Azure, that puts Azure at $70 million then, growing to 153 million. And lets just assume last years growth was similar, 100%, puts it at $300 million. And so this years maximum revenue from Azure would be 98% bigger at $600 million.

    So the maximum the Azure revenue can be is $600.

    Lets compare it to AWS... $14 billion in AWS sales.
    https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-posts-3-5b-revenue-47-last-year/

    In other words, Microsoft presents it as catching up (in terms of percentage), but growth doesn't work in percentages, and actually AWS is leaving them behind.

    Microsoft grew Azure revenues by $300 million, while Amazon grew AWS revenues in the same period by $1.1 billion. Amazon is increasing its lead.

    (Investing 101, learn when a company is trying to mislead you).

  8. Re:$600 MILLION max Azure revenue vs $14 BILLION A by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Azure cloud revenue was estimated at about 3 billion a year back at the start of 2017. So your maths is using some bad assumptions. you can't make an assumption of $70 million as your starting point as you have no fucking idea how the rest of the division went. There is no way in hell Azure revenue was as low as you are claiming.
     
    Investing 101, when you start with bad assumptions you come to bad conclusions. you should not be investing or giving anyone investment advise.

  9. Re:$600 MILLION max Azure revenue vs $14 BILLION A by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    perhaps use some more modern numbers rather than making garbage guesses to come to garbage conclusions. MS are still a long way behind but they are chipping away at the lead.
    https://winbuzzer.com/2018/01/16/report-microsoft-azure-took-4-market-share-aws-last-quarter-xcxwbn/

  10. 7 & Office + Cloud is cheaper than 7 & Off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So they can brag about it.

    Do you research.

    Get your discount.

  11. Who is using it and what for? by swb · · Score: 1

    I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems. We had a guy go whole hog into training and there was little customer interest, which doesn't help his (or anyone else's) training since it's a fairly dynamic offering which seems to evolve quickly.

    I have been unimpressed with Office 365. The online tools are missing basic features present in the on-premise version. And the costs are high, once you pass about 40 users on premise is actually cheaper, and more so as your numbers increase.

    1. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I work for a big public sector client in the UK and they use Azure "because it's Microsoft".

      The core Azure platform offerings seem to run OK - shame about the dreadful portal they make you administer it with though.

      Last time I checked, it was also very expensive compared to AWS - but hey, I don't pick up the tab...

    2. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Geeky · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Are you including email? An on-prem Exchange setup with decent storage allowances, redundancy and staff doesn't come cheap. Exchange in O365 has fairly generous email storage limits and doesn't require anything like as much technical expertise to run.

      It may be possible to do it for less on-prem, but good Exchange admins are hard to come by and penny pinching by management often leads to systems with tiny mailboxes so that you end up having the nightmare of local PST files if you want to keep old email.

      I have no doubt it can be done right on-prem, but in practice it rarely is. Certainly as a user in a corporate environment, O365 has been a breath of fresh air.

      For businesses though, the main argument seems to be the O365 is operational cost, on-prem requires capital expenditure.

      --
      Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
    3. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems.

      I wouldn't call it "interest".
      Microsoft has announced that Exchange 2016 will be the final version released as software, with the only upgrade path being Exchange 365 as a service.

      So while Exch 2016 is still under support, once it hits EOL you can't just buy the newest version to upgrade to, you must migrate to their cloud services.

      This leaves companies with two main options.
      A) Begin work on migrating away from Exchange completely, or
      B) Begin work on migrating into their cloud services.
      C) is to just remain on 2016 along with other security mitigation (typically another MTA between the Internet and Exchange)

      Since both are major changes in infrastructure, most everyone is starting on their plan earlier than usual. This is one time you can't wait to the last minute and then just throw money at the problem for an easy fix.

      The third option is always on the table but brings with it the risk of major exploits not getting patched and being vulnerable to insiders.

      I've also noticed some retail stores no longer carrying Office 2016 in box form, or only sell the license key card that is good for one installation. Also that isn't for an "installation on one PC", it's literally for "one installation"
      HD/SSD die and need to reinstall Windows from recovery media? You've used up your one Office installation already so time to purchase another!

      While that one doesn't effect the enterprise licensed editions of Office (yet?), many home users seem to be going with Office 365 thinking it is the cheaper option and lets them retain access to Office if they repair or replace their home computer.

    4. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      And the costs are high, once you pass about 40 users on-premise is actually cheaper, and more so as your numbers increase.

      Well of course on-premise is cheaper. The whole point of all this cloud/subscription bullshit is to charge you more.

      For example, at home I still use Microsoft Office 2003. Why? It works and it does everything I need. (and beginning with Office 2007, Microsoft started fucking up the UI)

      And, if had purchased it under Microsoft's current $100 a year subscription plan, I would have paid $1500 so far. For what? Nobody has invented any new word-processing/spreadsheet tasks that can't be done with my old copy of Office.

      So, Microsoft has to find a way to squeeze more money out of people.

    5. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      If by 'big public sector client' you mean the NHS then thank heavens they're not still using Windows XP

      https://www.theinquirer.net/in...

      90 PER CENT of the NHS continues to run Windows XP machines, two and a half years after Microsoft ditched support for the ageing OS.

      It's Citrix who is ringing the alarm bells, having learnt that 90 per cent of NHS Trusts are still running Windows XP PCs. The firm sent Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to 63 NHS Trusts, 42 of which responded.

      The data also revealed that 24 Trusts are still not sure when they'll migrate from Windows XP to a newer version of Microsoft's OS. 14 per cent said they would be transitioning to a new operating system by the end of this year, while 29 per cent pledged to make the move sometime next year.

      That article was from 08 December 2016. WannaCry hit May 2017 and caused chaos on unpatched systems. XP hadn't been updated since 2014

      https://www.nao.org.uk/report/...

      The Department was warned about the risks of cyber attacks on the NHS a year before WannaCry and although it had work underway it did not formally respond with a written report until July 2017. The Department and Cabinet Office wrote to trusts in 2014, saying it was essential they had "robust plans" to migrate away from old software, such as Windows XP by April 2015. In March and April 2017, NHS Digital had issued critical alerts warning organisations to patch their systems to prevent WannaCry. However, before 12 May 2017, the Department had no formal mechanism for assessing whether local NHS organisations had complied with their advice and guidance and whether they were prepared for a cyber attack.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    6. Re:Who is using it and what for? by jaa101 · · Score: 1

      The cloud is a way to force customers into a subscription model for software. A subscription model is really needed for software but customers have been very resistant to going that way. Purchasing software without maintenance is not tenable in the long term because it means vendors have to concentrate on adding new features to encourage upgrades to maintain their cash flow. This causes bloat and adds bugs and makes for many different versions of a product which then all need maintenance. Customers would rather much more time be spent by vendors fixing bugs and having reliable software. Today's security environment means that all software in use needs to be maintained by vendors with security patches and they can't afford to do this for ten-plus-year-old software that people paid for once.

    7. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      When I checked a few months ago, Azure was more expensive than AWS for compute but cheaper for storage. Since my use case was storage (offsite backup of my photos), I went with Azure.

    8. Re:Who is using it and what for? by swb · · Score: 1

      I have read that 2016 is not the last on-premise version. The next on premise version is in progress and MS has said they have no plans (now, anyway) to eliminate on premise.

      I think O365 is too expensive for large clients (at a fairly low scale you could start throwing away hardware and software annually running on premise and still be cheaper) and there are too many data security and compliance requirements that would make companies refuse to go to O365.

    9. Re:Who is using it and what for? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      I think O365 is too expensive for large clients

      Note that very large clients don't pay anything like the list price per customer. This has always been the case with Microsoft products, offering big discounts on site licenses for large companies.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      In my old IT gig the biggest benefit of O365 was that we stayed on the current version all the time. I didn't have to go convince someone to let us upgrade to a new version of Office or a new version of Exchange, it just happened.

      I do consulting now, and I have customers that are still using (and paying for support on!) Office 2010 and Exchange 2013

    11. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I think O365 is too expensive for large clients (at a fairly low scale you could start throwing away hardware and software annually running on premise and still be cheaper)

      I don't think this is correct. Competent engineers and enterprise grade hardware are very expensive. Beating the retail price for Email, Instant Messaging, Onedrive, Sharepoint, and Office is non-trivial. Beating the volume license and enterprise cost is downright hard.

      What is you using as your cost per terabyte for enterprise storage? Are you including the cost of full time administrators?

    12. Re:Who is using it and what for? by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      or you sell the software and separately sell a support subscription, which is hugely common in corp environments, but again the SMB and individual users would likely balk at this pretty badly, or not pay for the support and then cry when they are compromised by a vuln.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    13. Re:Who is using it and what for? by swb · · Score: 1

      In my opinion, the "complexity" of Exchange management for basic installs (single server, no DAG, under 500 users) is greatly overstated. It's gotten somewhat more bothersome to manage with the decline in quality since 2013, frequent CUs and the degrading of the GUI by switching to web only. But overall, it doesn't require a ton of management involvement. Maybe 2-4 hours a week of monitoring at best.

      The problem with storage costs, etc, is that storage is relatively cheap and with virtualization there's almost always some marginal capacity available. Even in clients who have migrated to O365, there's still an on-premise server and storage environment, so adding Exchange doesn't really add that much to the larger infrastructure cost. It's mostly licensing.

      I don't buy the "beating the retail price on all the stuff they include". O365 is like cable TV, people want it for Exchange and few get deep into the rest of besides maybe Skype for Business. So you're paying for functionality you may not use, like paying for ESPN and getting 4 reality TV channels you won't watch.

      Only the largest enterprises have "full time Exchange admins" -- there's just not enough to do for a midsize deployment to pay one person to manage it. I haven't met a full time "email administrator" in nearly 20 years.

    14. Re:Who is using it and what for? by labnet · · Score: 1

      Do you work for M$?.
      I've run on premises exchange for 20 years for 50 staff and I've spent about 2 days a year managing it and I'm an electrical engineer, not an IT guy.
      We also run 18vms on a single Dell R720. This would be dear as poison to do on Azure.

      --
      46137
    15. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd bet 99% of the on premise installations of exchange are hackable.DOSable, ***-able Email should be a service that just works IT guys. Either the Microsoft or Google can do it for you. And don't have to worry about it. Do more important IT stuff.

    16. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No you haven't. Anyone that only spends 2 days a year on an exchange server is either straight out lying or delusional. Ever put on any patches, CU's, look at your storage, etc?

      You may be like a lot of my customers. They think they have it all under control until they don't. O365 is bar-none the best email option out there for any customer that has less than 500 users.

      In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if MS got rid of the standard version of exchange. I wish they would, so people like you would quit calling me at 5 PM on Friday or on the weekend because they screwed it up.

    17. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ive read the same things but Exchange 2019 is on the way:
      https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2017/10/02/exchange-server-2019/

    18. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have the exact opposite opinion. I was a full time exchange admin with a 4 host DAG in 2 sites with a lag copy offsite.

      Then I went to an MSP and now I deal with these single server setups all the time. Its not too bad if no one pokes at them but you know we have those "admins" that do god knows what and we get to fix it. Usually at night or over the weekend.

      I just think for non-enterprise users, if you factor in everything included, the cloud is cheaper and more secure. Definitely a higher uptime, and I don't have to spend so much time after hours downloading 2GB updates and wondering if Exchange will crap out this time or make it through.

    19. Re:Who is using it and what for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The online tools are missing basic features present in the on-premise version.

      This quote says you are full of shit. It is the standard ignorant post by those that don't actually understand what Office 365 is, if you have Office 365 you get both the on-premises suite and integration into the cloud. Office 365 is a superset of the on-premises functionality not a subset.

  12. Consumer Friendly Policies = More Profit by dryriver · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Microsoft shot itself in the foot with the clusterfuck that was the Windows 8 "no start button" UI - nobody using Windows wanted the Win 7 interface changed significantly, and certainly not in the horrible way Win 8 did it. Win 7 was a good OS, and worked fine for just about any task. Windows 8 was, to put it bluntly, unusable. Almost like somebody sat down and said "lets inflict as much pain and inconvenience on the user as possible". Then, MS wanted everybody to pay again for Windows 10, and imposed all sorts of crap on people with Win 10 - upgrades that happen on their own, telemetry that can't be switched off, privacy settings that seem to do nothing - and so on and so forth. All while giving people a release 10 that was inferior in many ways to release 7, which by this time ran lightning fast on current hardware. Microsoft's CEO comes from a cloud-engineering background and is an "all cloud all the time" sort of guy. Is this good for consumers? No. But it is good for OSX and Linux. I've been on Windows for 20+ years, and I'm also considering going over to Linux. I also don't want my office documents or other personal stuff in anybody's datacenter. So Office 365 is totally unattractive to me, whereas LibreOffice for example is looking better and better to me all the time. Perhaps MS should get a new CEO who isn't cloud-crazy.

    --
    Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
    1. Re:Consumer Friendly Policies = More Profit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm a security guy, so I see the world from the perspective as risk. Have you tried using LibreOffice? I'm no MS shill (one laptop of mine runs macOS and the other Debian). LibreOffice is so far behind MS Office. I don't disagree that it's a risk to use cloud services, but it's a risk to waste a bunch of extra time working with documents because you moved from MS Office to LibreOffice. I would make damn sure that you have a real risk you can articulate before you switch to a less productive tool chain. LibreOffice is great, and I'm glad it exists. I run it on all my machines. But, when I need to give a talk or create a nice spreadsheet for work, I always use MS Office. It is so much better than LibreOffice it's not funny. This doesn't even take into account the wild regressions that pop up in LibreOffice (such as when LibreOffice started opening in the background on macOS. Why? Who knows! It's a random regression.).

    2. Re:Consumer Friendly Policies = More Profit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nobody at Microsoft cares what you decide to do, they care what businesses decide to do. I'm in the field everyday with small - medium businesses. 95% of them would be better off in the cloud, bar-none. And that includes security. People dont update (it costs money), they dont upgrade (it costs money), they rarely do more than just the extreme bare minimum to keep their networks running. And there are thousands of them, and Microsoft knows this.

      That's why they push the cloud. They want their products under their control. That way they can control their own narrative. Look at Spectre and Meltdown. The cloud was patched BEFORE the announcement. How many non-cloud customers are patched even today? How many will remain unpatched 10 years from now?

      Not to say there aren't data/privacy issues, but those exist on-site as well as in the cloud, and at least in the cloud they provide mitigations against it.

    3. Re:Consumer Friendly Policies = More Profit by ljw1004 · · Score: 2

      Perhaps MS should get a new CEO who isn't cloud-crazy.

      "Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $7.8 billion and increased 15%"

      "Server products and cloud services revenue increased 18% driven by Azure revenue growth of 98%"

      I think you picked the wrong article for your advice to Microsoft...

  13. Well Done Walmart! by bwanagary · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that Walmart's recent (2017) policy  of refusal to conduct business with any partner who uses AWS has probably driven a lot of business in the direction of Azure.  And big businesses.

    1. Re:Well Done Walmart! by kriston · · Score: 1

      Well, Wal-Mart has its own cloud service, too.

      --

      Kriston

  14. Re:Azure $600 million business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    other divisions weren't flat, last year they were estimated at around 300 million decline as cloud displaces them. This seems to be your fundamental problem, you don't have sufficient information to make your garbage estimates. other more recent articles place Azure at the bottom end around $3.5 billion or top end 4.5 billion.

  15. Re: $600 MILLION max Azure revenue vs $14 BILLION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That article covers a report thaylt makes estimates based on earnings figures. I doubt that it is very accurate, foe one because Microsoft is vague and devious in how it reports revenue.

    So, Azure is included in 'Intelligent Clioud' revenue, which AFAIK also includes *all Office 365* revenue.

    There are rumours that licence payments from AWS and Google's GCP, and smaller 'cloud' players is *also* counted as "Azure" revenue, not "Windows Server" revenue.

    So a lot of this supposef "claw-back" may just be the result of more Windows work-loads moving from on-prem to non-Azure cloud ...