Microsoft Corp. said its earnings declined 25% in the third quarter, as the company reported lower operating profits across several of its business lines. Office 365 consumer subscribers, for example, increased to 22.2 million. Revenue in Intelligent Cloud grew 3% to $6.1 billion, with Azure revenue up 120%, though this is down from 5% and 140% respectively in the previous quarter. The app can create sticky notes, whiteboard environments, and other handwritten formats, and it’s integrated with other Microsoft applications such as Office, Maps, and Edge. This bucket does not include the on-premises server, cloud hosting, or other Microsoft consulting services.
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Windows 10 Growth Despite a slowdown in the PC business, which was a given before the release of the latest quarterly results, Microsoft pointed to the growth of Windows 10, which Nadella said at 270 million users is double the number of Windows 7 users at the same point in time after its release. The Microsoft officials reported that the company is on the way to achieve its goal of annual rate of $20 billion.
Windows Phone was the main culprit for the company’s weaker than expected quarter. “It remains clear we are one of the two leaders in the market”. He also emphasized on the incremental growth of cyber security markets, and argued that the integration of cyber security features such as Advanced Threat Protection into Office 365 has caused a roughly 35% year-over-year (YoY) growth in monthly active users.
Microsoft’s third-quarter results reflected many of our long-term expectations for the firm: torrid growth in Azure, minimal declines in the Windows business, growing Surface shipments and widespread adoption of Office 365. And then there was the disappointing guidance… Share price has increased from just below $40 to roughly $55 during Nadella’ tenure as CEO. A spokeswoman said the segment’s name “is to align to the ambition” of building the cloud.
Redmond’s Surface revenue did grow 61 percent however, driven by Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book sales. We are innovating in new areas to help organizations digitally transform.
“We’re halfway to our FY 2018 goal of $20bn”, he said. Its cloud services are driving growth, while traditional parts of the company’s business are shrinking alongside the PC market. By utilizing the Azure Stack offering, Microsoft claims customers are able to process certain workloads in Azure data centres, while also keeping mission critical workloads in-house on the Azure Stack itself.
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We believe that the company still needs to work on the interface. No one else who is in the public cloud business at any scale has that kind of capability. “So Azure’s stack is completely unique to Microsoft. So I would say that’s another point of differentiation”.
