Leo, Richard, and Paul discuss Microsoft’s blockbuster financial quarter, other quarterly financial reports, Windows, Microsoft 365, AI, Xbox, and much more.
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Microsoft earnings
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it earned a net income of $21.9 billion on revenues of $62 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2023. Those figures are up 33 percent and 18 percent, respectively, year-over-year (YOY).
Intelligent Cloud: Azure, AI
- Microsoft’s biggest business unit delivered $25.9 billion in revenue, up 20 percent YOY and driven primarily by its Azure cloud platform.
- Azure revenues were up 30 percent in the quarter, 6 points of which Microsoft attributed to “AI services.”
- Server and cloud services revenue jumped 22 percent.
- Enterprise Mobility installed base grew 11 percent to over 268 million seats.
Productivity and Business Processes: Microsoft 365
- $19.2 billion in revenues, with growth of 13 percent YOY.
- Office Commercial revenues were up 15 percent, and Office 365 seats grew 12 percent.
- Office Consumer grew 5 percent, with the Microsoft 365 consumer offerings growing 16 percent to 78.4 million subscribers.
More Personal Computing: Xbox, Windows
- Revenues of $16.9 billion, up 19 percent YOY.
- Activision Blizzard has changed things: Gaming revenues surged 49 percent (44 points from Activision Blizzard)
- Activision Blizzard has changed things: Xbox content and services revenues were up 61 percent (55 points from Activision Blizzard)
- Xbox hardware revenues inched up by 3 percent
- Windows revenues from PC makers grew 11 percent in the quarter, with Microsoft citing “market volumes stabilizing to pre-pandemic levels.”
- That stabilization didn’t help the Surface business, as Microsoft reported a 9 percent decline in revenues from Devices.
Other industry financial reports
- Google – Bigger than Microsoft, with non-advertising businesses seeing growth
- Intel – Struggles continue, but a light at the end of the tunnel
- AMD – Honestly, not doing great. The time for AMD to gain on Intel is coming to a close
Windows
Windows Insider Program:
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/296758/google-releases-arm64-build-of-chrome-for-windows. A new era?
Microsoft Edge is at it again. But aren’t we just getting numb to this now?
Microsoft Edge 121 adds several new features
OneDrive gets a new design on the web
Microsoft 365
Teams goes down for the count, making us realize how much we hate Teams
AI: Welcome to the AI deep fake era. Also, welcome to the era when eras are weeks, not years
Microsoft adds porn deepfake guardrails to Designer AI – So, this wasn’t there before now?
FTC is investigating Microsoft/OpenAI and other Big Tech AI partnerships
Nvidia RTX Video HDR can now convert SDR video to HDR
Xbox
Microsoft can finally bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to the iPhone (and Fortnite is coming back to the iPhone in the EU)
Xbox president joins the chorus of complaints around Apple’s EU DMA non-compliance compliance
Xbox Series S screenshots will be restricted to Full HD
1900 layoffs at Activision Blizzard, Zenimax, and Xbox
Tips and picks
Tip of the week: Upgrade to passkeys*
App pick of the week: Insync
If you need OneDrive or Google Drive on Linux, Insync does the job. But there are other benefits and one semi-major missing feature.
Semi-related: Arc Search for iPhone is the future of Arc on mobile
RunAs Radio this week: Software Licensing in 2024 with Mary Jo Foley
https://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/917
Brown liquor pick of the week: Dailuaine 16 Flora & Fauna
https://www.florafaunawhisky.com/collection/1991-release/dailuaine-16-years/