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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.