Microsoft delivered another strong set of figures in its latest financial results, for the period April-June 2018. Total revenue of $30.085 million was up 17% year on year, and all three of the company\u2019s sectors (Office, Azure and consumer) showed strong growth.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s notable? Largely this is more of the same. A few things to note. Linked in revenue increased 37% year on year \u2013 an acquisition that seems to be making sense for the company. Dynamics 365 revenue grew by 65%. The Dynamics story is all about cloud synergy. As an on-premises product Dynamics CRM (the part of the suite I know best) was relatively undistinguished but as a cloud product the seamless integration between Office 365 and Dynamics 365 (and Azure Active Directory) makes it compelling.<\/p>\n
Windows 10 is doing OK, possibly as more businesses heave themselves off Windows 7 and buy new PCs with OEM licenses as they do.<\/p>\n
Even areas in which Microsoft is far from dominant did well. Gaming was up 39%, Surface 25% and Search advertising up 17%.<\/p>\n
The biggest growth in the quarter, according to the breakdown here<\/a>, was in Azure. up 89%. This growth is not without pain; the Register reports<\/a> capacity issues in the UK South region, for example, with users getting the message \u201cUnfortunately, due to high demand for virtual machines in this region, we are not able to approve your quota request at this time.\u201d You can still create VMs, but not necessarily in the region you want.<\/p>\n Will Microsoft outpace AWS? My take on this has not changed. AWS does very little wrong and remains the pre-eminent cloud for IAAS and many services by some distance. What AWS does not have is Office 365, or armies of Microsoft partners helping enterprise customers to shunt more and more of their IT infrastructure into Azure. Microsoft makes more money from licensing: Windows Server, SQL Server, Office 365 and Dynamics seats, and so on. AWS does more business at a lower margin. These are big differences. I see it as unlikely that Azure will overtake AWS in the provision of essential cloud services like VMs, containers, cloud storage and so on. AWS also has a better reliability track record. However, the success of Azure means that enterprise customers no longer need to go to AWS to get the benefits of cloud. Perhaps the more interesting question is the extent to which AWS (or Google) can persuade enterprise customers to shift away from Microsoft\u2019s high-margin applications. <\/p>\n Longer term, there is significant risk for the company in its retreat from mobile. We are now seeing Google work hard in the laptop market with Chromebooks alongside Android mobile. Coming sometime is Google Fuchsia which may be a single operating system for both. It is worth recalling that Microsoft built its success on winning users for its PC operating system; and that IBM lost its IT dominance by ceding this to Microsoft.<\/p>\n Here is the breakdown by segment, such as it is: <\/p>\n Quarter ending June 30th 2018 vs quarter ending June 30th 2017, $millions<\/em><\/p>\n The segments break down as:<\/p>\n Productivity and Business Processes<\/strong>: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn<\/p>\n Intelligent Cloud<\/strong>: Server products, Azure cloud services<\/p>\n More Personal Computing<\/strong>: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft delivered another strong set of figures in its latest financial results, for the period April-June 2018. Total revenue of $30.085 million was up 17% year on year, and all three of the company\u2019s sectors (Office, Azure and consumer) showed strong growth. What\u2019s notable? Largely this is more of the same. A few things to … Continue reading Microsoft’s strong financials, and some notes on Azure vs AWS and the risks of losing in mobile<\/span> \n\n
\n Segment<\/td>\n Revenue<\/td>\n Change<\/td>\n Operating income<\/td>\n Change<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Productivity and Business Processes<\/td>\n 9668<\/td>\n +1140<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/td>\n 3466<\/td>\n +575<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Intelligent Cloud<\/td>\n 9606<\/td>\n +1784<\/td>\n 3901<\/td>\n +990<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n More Personal Computing<\/td>\n 10811<\/td>\n +1576<\/font><\/td>\n 3012<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n +826<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n