Microsoft Makes Q4 Profit of $6 B; Strong Windows Revenue
Windows division enjoyed revenue increase of 24 percent from 2011's fourth quarter.
Microsoft has announced its financial results for 2012's fourth quarter, with strong performance in its Windows division.
It generated a profit of $6.38 billion, or 76 cents a share, on revenue of $21.46 billion during the last quarter, with its phone division generating revenue of $546 million. The former figure represents a decrease when compared to the $6.62 billion, or 78 cents a share, earned during the same quarter in 2011. The figure is also slightly below Wall Street estimates of 77 cents a share on revenue of $21.53 billion.
The Windows division generated revenue of $5.88 billion, an increase of 24 percent year on year. Since its late October launch, Microsoft has sold over 60 million Windows 8 licenses.
"Our big, bold ambition to reimagine Windows as well as launch Surface and Windows Phone 8 has sparked growing enthusiasm with our customers and unprecedented opportunity and creativity with our partners and developers," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "With new Windows devices, including Surface Pro, and the new Office on the horizon, we'll continue to drive excitement for the Windows ecosystem and deliver our software through devices and services people love and businesses need."
Elsewhere, the Server & Tools business that consists of products including SQL Server and System Center posted revenue growth of 9 percent to $5.19 billion. The Business Division, which includes its popular Office suite, generated $5.69 billion in revenue, a decrease of 10 percent.
The Entertainment and Devices Division, which includes the Xbox lineup, experienced a revenue decline of 11 percent to $3.77 billion. During 2012's Q4, Microsoft sold 5.9 million Xbox consoles, which is a drop of 28 percent. Bought for $8.5 billion in 2011, Skype experienced a 59 percent increase in call minutes.
The Online Services Division, which includes online advertising generated by web entities such as its Bing search engine, increased its revenue by 11 percent to $869 million.
I know it would have been where I work at: 250 licenses easy...
But most of "what's left of Windows 7" had a free upgrade path to W8, so it wasn't really a case of this or that. A small part of why they got to 60 million licenses was due to the cheaper upgrade cost to W8 Pro. The smaller margin compared to previous upgrades was offset by the volume.
OR WILL IT BE?
I feel bad for bosses of 'content creators' who don't know how to use Desktop in Windows 8 and customize the UI to their likings, or at least have tech support who can make Windows 8 identical to 7 by installing Classic Shell (which has the option to boot directly to desktop and to disable active corners) on every Windows 8 PC in the office.
As for their other segments, Windows Phone 8 is a pretty good phone system (I've seen though don't own), so I hope it can gain better traction than it has. The Pro tablet could help them again being that it is a sector they have little existing exposure to, but it's hard to gauge where it will fit into the broader tablet market and if its bells and whistles will distinguish it enough from the rest of the market. And I do own an Xbox, but I have not been a great fan of their games library in general, and have not heard particularly encouraging news about their next system, so I would be hesitant to putting too much hopes on that, particularly in the next couple quarters since any new Xbox won't release until the end of the year, and you're not likely to see any blockbuster games for the Xbox 360 until at least around E3 in June.
No doubt, they had a good quarter, but there are headwinds in their future.
Microsoft doesnt seems to realize this thing and decide to rise the win8 price to a retarded $199 level.
for the first time revenues decreased after a windows release
w8 user base is stuck at 2,17%, see netapplications
surface preorders were cut by half
surface pro is just anoter ultrabook, and ultrabook fad is already gone
ms is dead, it was able to be apparenly live in this quarter only due preexisting update agreements that allowed them to stuff the supply chain with 60m of license that are going to never be sold to end users, sperading the disease to the whole pc industry, just look to what is happening to dell now.
in a matter of months gravity will be back in, the too big to fail card ms is playing will no longer work with any businness parthner, and it will be embarrassing for ms fanboys and redmond pr to explain whit their beloved empire is crumbling so fast, and condone the grievus damages it will do to the entire pc industry.
install one of the start menu programs, they're like 5 MB
I am interested in a Windows 8 tablet, but not until they get less power hungry x86 processors (Intel this is in your corner) so that we can have a Full windows 8 pro run for 8 to 9 hours on battery. I've used the Surface w/ attached keyboard and was pleasantly surprised at its usability. I'll stick with my Asus Transfer Infinity & HP Laptop until they get the Win8Pro tablets lighter /w better battery. A Windows 8 RT tablet is a waste of time in my book because I want full application support.
I'm not, seeing how the Windows division revenue jump was 24%, but when Windows 7 came out, it was over 70% (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539304578262190945581974.html) and the market agrees, since Microsoft's shares are down over 2%.
Face it, Windows 8 launch and adoption is the worst in Microsoft's recent history. Vista had a higher adoption rate than Windows 8, how's that for comparison?
If your company adopts a new OS this early then the IT dept is run by idiots.
The problem with win8 is not the OS, or even the immature people who spend hours whining about having to do an extra click once a day, and how that eats too much of their time. The problem with win8 is that it is a touch oriented program, but there are not a lot of wanted touch oriented machines to put them on yet. Yes, you can use win8 on a standard desktop (I do) and it works fine, but it really shines on a touch capable device. Once kinnect for windows and Leapmotion come out later this year I think people will change their tune a little bit.
The other paradigm shift in win8 that is not as obvious is the change in role of the OS. Windows has always been a graphical interface that translates the language of hardware into a usable UI. Windows still does this, but metro goes a step further. Metro is not so much about the new colorful boxey style of the interface, that is just marketing. Merto is about taking the same hardware translation of an interface, and making a services translation to an interface. The idea is that apps are merely templates which run on groups of data which may exist on your computer or the cloud, but different apps can interact with that data in different ways, or attach different meanings to the same data. The paradigm shift here is that in a traditional desktop application programs were islands which were supported by the OS. Metro then acts as a subway system of sorts which connects apps and services together by allowing different systems to interact with the same data.
This is best explained with the contacts list and some of the baked in win8 apps. You connect the OS to Facebook, twitter, email accts, skype, etc. All of these contacts are then dumped into a single pool of information, and the system does it's best to consolidate the contacts for you. Then you go through and fix the remaining contacts, and you realize... you have just aggregated information from a bunch of different products and services into a single monolithic list of contacts. This pool of contacts is then available on a wide varieity of other programs such as twitter, chat, your WP8 device, and all of your MS web services. The OS (or I guess it is really your LiveID?) is providing a place to put information, and then your various programs interact with it in different ways. Your phone is looking at it one way, your email applications look at it another, the people hub looks at it another, etc. etc. etc. But you get the picture, the data is seperate from the program, and all programs potentially have access (with the user's permission) to this data.
Right now developers are making the mistake of viewing metro apps as just square themed versions of desktop apps. They are tied into their own services, and they are not very dynamic at using all of the rich resources that metro can offer. But, if they changed their model to treat their program as a filter or modifier of information rather than a stand-alone program with its own private information, then we could get some really interesting and compelling apps. But it takes time to learn this new way of doing things, so it may be a little bit before we see apps really use what is available to them.
Anywho, the point is that it makes sense why win8 is not taking off. It is not the interface that is bad, it is that hardware makers have not caught up to the new paradigm yet, and software makers have their own learning curve to catch up on. But that is understandable... look at the last time the paradigm was changed; Win95 caused all sorts of growing pains! It took YEARS for software developers to design around the new way on interacting with Windows, and it took a while for hardware developers to come up with computers with enough resources to run the interface properly without also being extremely expensive. Win8 is going through a similar crisis, but we are learning to deal with it much quicker than we did with win95, and so I bet that in a year people will really grow to enjoy what win8 brings to the table, and I think that windows Blue will also bring some improvements to metro to iron out some of the more legit complaints about the new interface.
Start bar / task bar, is actually much much better in Win 8; it actually works well with multiple monitors.