announced the financial results yesterday evening. And the vitally important devices and consumer revenue grew by a solid 12 percent to $8.30 billion. This includes stupendous Windows Pro OEM sales that came in at 19 percent positive, leading to an overall growth of 4 percent for the product. Bing also posted some slight growth, at least in the US, and its market share grew to 18.6 percent. Couple that with search advertising revenue increase of 38 percent, and it makes for a very neat read. The same, however, cannot be said of the Surface side of business. Redmond did nothing to make this product less of an enigma, saying that revenue grew by 50 percent to approximately 500 million. Doesn’t tell much now does it? Unit sales, please, unit sales. Just like the Xbox console sales of 2 million, which include 1.2 million Xbox One units. Rounding up the good performance in the consumer side of things is Office 365 Home, which now boasts 4.4 million subscribers, adding nearly 1 million in just three months. Be interesting just how much this grows, as the Office productivity suite is now available on the iPad. Coming to commercial revenue, it grew by the count of 7 percent to $12.23 billion. Office 365 registered a massive 100 percent increase with commercial seats nearly doubling. Azure revenue outdid it with an uplift even more massive. The cloud platform grew over 150 percent in this quarter, while Lync, SharePoint and Exchange collectively showing double digit growth. Windows volume licensing also increased by 11 percent, confirming that business consumers and enterprises continue to make Windows their platform of choice. The first fiscal quarter of the year is usually considered a humdrum one for most businesses. But the fact remains that Microsoft has shown growth in both sides of the business; consumer and corporate. Then again, did anyone really expect anything different? Sure, a more detailed classification of hardware sales would be welcome, as this is the area Redmond is pushing really hard. However, this is diversification on an epic scale. Diversification with direction. Bravo.]]>
All Comments
Great analysis. Love the breakdown. I’m especially curious to see how XBOX does in the next quarter. Not a lot of games out right now.
Office 365 adding a million subscribers in 3 months! Wow! Big quarter there. Awesome breakdown, Phillip. Keep it up!
So even though I heard quite a few IT techs complain about win8, it doesn’t hurt the OS sale to business. The strategy of MS is simple. Keep their business accounts. For people who want to bring bread home, they have to learn windows and office.