Monthly Archives: July 2019

cloud computing, microsoft, office 365, tech

Microsoft earnings: strong quarter, but Xbox revenue dives

Microsoft has announced its quarterly financial statements, reporting revenue of $33.7 billion, up 12% on the same period last year.

The company stated that Azure revenue is up 64% year on year. Azure has overtaken the other two segments and is now the biggest, by a small amount. In addition, Azure gross margin has improved by 6% year on year.

Office 365 revenue is up 31% year on year.

Gaming was a black spot, declining 10% year on year – though Xbox Live monthly active users is at a record 65 million. The main problem is a 48% decline in the volume of Xbox consoles sold.

Quarter ending June 30th 2019 vs quarter ending June 30th 2018, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Operating income Change
Productivity and Business Processes 11047 +1379 4344 +878
Intelligent Cloud 11391 +1785 4502 +601
More Personal Computing 11279 +468 3559 +547

The segments break down as:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn

Intelligent Cloud: Server products, Azure cloud services

More Personal Computing: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware

google, tech

Not OK Google

Views on privacy vary. Most people either do not think about it, or trust that big tech companies will do no harm with knowledge of your location, who your friends are, what you like to view on the internet and so on.

That truest may be shaken by disturbing revelations last week from Belgian broadcaster VRT. The report states that:

  • Google records speech heard by its Google Assistant or Google Home devices
  • Google passes on a proportion of these recordings to third parties, to assist with transcription. This is done to improve the speech recognition
  • Many of these recordings – it is not known exactly how many – are recorded unintentionally, rather being started with the “OK Google” trigger words. This could be because of some sound that the device incorrectly interprets as “OK Google”, or because of a mis-tap on a smartphone.
  • The recording are not effectively anonymised. They include addresses, names, business names and so on. Identity is often easy to work out.
  • The recordings are personal. They include medical queries, domestic arguments, even on one occasion “a woman who was in definite distress.”

Google’s response? Its main concern is to prevent future leaks of audio files, rather than with the fact that these recordings should not have been in the hands of third parties in the first place. “We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again,” says Google’s David Monsees.

Did users consent, somewhere in the miasma and dark UI patterns of “Accept” buttons that now bombard us on the web? Maybe, but I do not think this is what was expected by those users whose identifiable private moments were first recorded and then passed around by Google. They have been let down.

google, microsoft, tech

Chromium and Microsoft annoyances : Dynamics CRM issues like broken downloads, Chromium team “won’t fix”

Microsoft Dynamics CRM (which exists in both cloud-hosted and on-premises versions) is not working well with Chromium, the open source browser engine used by Google Chrome.

I discovered one obvious issue using Edge Preview, which is based on Chromium. If you download a file, for example using a Word template, Microsoft Office does not recognise it. It turns out to have single quotes around it. I imagine the quotes are there to allow for document names which include spaces, but it should use double quotes. Chromium (and Chrome) used to work OK with single quotes but now does not. It’s causing quite a bit of grief for CRM users in businesses that have standardised on Chrome.

You can read all the details here. Here’s a user report by Troy Siegert, whose organization frequently downloads files from Dynamics:

This week when the Chrome beta build went mainstream, my 30 users suddenly had Windows 10 unable to determine what to do with the files they were so dutifully downloading and trying to look at. Instead of *Report.pdf* the file was named *’Report.pdf’* and of course Windows 10 has no idea what a *.pdf’* file is or what to do with it, so it started asking users questions for which they weren’t prepared and that they didn’t understand. Some of them got confused and tried to associate .xlsx files with Adobe and then became unhappy when Adobe was throwing up messages about corrupt files.

Google’s Abdul Syed responds:

For any server operators running into this issue, the way to fix for this is to use double quotes around any quoted string in the Content-Disposition header (And, more generally, in any HTTP header).

Translation: fix your stuff, don’t expect us to fix our stuff. And in fact the issue has been marked WontFix (Closed).

There was actually a bit of a battle about this. The original commit here (Oct 2018) was reverted here (Feb 12 2019) and unreverted here (Feb 19 2019). In other words, the Chromium team knew it broke downloads for Dynamics CRM users but were not willing to compromise.

I am in two minds about this one. Dynamics CRM is sloppy in places and part of me favours giving Microsoft’s team a kick to make them fix thing that should have been fixed years back.

On the other hand, Mozilla Firefox works fine with the CRM single quotes and you cannot help wondering if Google’s attitude would be different were it a Google application that is impacted.