Microsoft reports record first-quarter revenue of $18.53 billion
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
Google is smearing the smartphone market, at the expense of Apple's cash engine, Microsoft is smearing the Search market at the expense of Google's cash engine and Linux is smearing the operating system market at the expense of Microsoft's cash engine. Seems like there is a lot of pressure to diversify.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/24/pricing-engine-adwords-bing...
Is this true? I don't see too many Enterprise shops going "no more windows, exchange, and active directory. its ubuntu, postfix, and ldap all the way!"
Linux certainly has killed commercial unixes, but MS Server products never got popular for web and other areas Linux is traditionally strong in. The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened.
MS still leads with many enterprise products. For all the hand-wringing over surface and bing, MS is swimming in money on the enterprise side.
In the past. But now, MS desktop deteriorates and that process will only grow with Linux finally getting more traction. Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop.
My wife uses windows because I can't convince her that google docs or openoffice are ok. She just prefers MS Office.
Valve's push may get us better graphic card drivers, but I don't know anyone who uses windows over linux because of that (I know a few people who stubbornly use linux notwithstanding crappy drivers though)
Granted, I'm not a good representative of the average user.
That's why it kind of surprises me that MS sticks its neck out on UX redesigns like the ribbon or eliminating the desktop, since every change gives the core userbase another excuse to try something new. (Even if there are a few good underlying UX ideas, like larger buttons, more prominent placement of common commands, and saving me a Win key before I just start typing to search...)
Depends on what you are using them for. I've tried to convince a lot of people that that is the case, and then I wrote a book and found out it isn't actually the case. They are good enough for casual use, they aren't actually good enough for more serious work. Editing in particular is far far superior with Word.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone...
It's incredible that the enterprise mail market is dominated by MS. How Linux didn't get that is beyond me.
Plus nothing really came along that was a viable alternative to Office. Don't count MS out of tablets yet, Surface falls into line quite well with an Office dominated culture.
The ASUS T100TA is an impressive tablet or mini-laptop based on the new Bay Trail Atoms and will allow many corporate users who are tied to the MS stack to do what they need on a tablet. They run Windows 8, not RT and are start at $350.
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book...
Same kinda true of IBM too, no? Except AFAIK, they don't even have a Linux flavor the claim as their own. I think they're clearly a supporter of Linux, but any marketing I've ever heard from them (admittedly not much), was for their own core products.
Red Hat is indeed a commercial company with a Linux distro as its core product, but, while it may be the most successful "Linux" company, isn't it small potatoes compared to AAPL and MSFT? Most non techie people I know probably wouldn't know what Red Hat is, but I suspect all would know Apple and Microsoft.
First it has nearly sealed off the 'cloud' from Microsoft. Sure there is Azure, and you can ask many VPS providers to put Windows into the box, but Linux system images dominate the 'cloud' OS space by a large margin. So a lot of what Microsoft used to sell as 'back office', aka an NT server for a small business running exchange and maybe Access is shifting over to gmail + AWS.
The other place its getting crushed is of course mobile phones. If it weren't for licensing revenues from patents the Android (and Linux kernel) would be doing more financial damage, as it is, the number of 'seats' which run the operating system of choice are running a Linux derivative. We've talked about how this is the 'post PC' era, and it is, and the Post PC, whether it is your Samsung 'smart TV' or your phone, predominantly doesn't pay Microsoft an OS tax.
So revenues that Microsoft used to get for OS installs are now time limited patent licenses.
Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.
http://www.liveside.net/2013/05/06/skydrive-reaches-250-mill...
places Sky Drive in fourth, behind Dropbox, Google Drive, and ICloud....
Admittedly I'm referencing data I read somewhere which I can't find right now, so I'll retract the statement about SkyDrive being the biggest. It is certainly up there though and growing according to this financial report.
Or Hotmail. I don't use Windows, but I use Hotmail and I have some files stashed away on Skydrive. This is stuff I don't access frequently where it's fine to go through the browser to get them.
I even tried it on a Mac, but it needs a case-insensitive filesystem. Amateurs...
But it's more than that, SkyDrive was launched in 2007, DropBox 2008. In classic Microsoft style, they didn't really tell anyone it existed for a few years.
I'll be honest, I don't 'get' dropbox. Their security record means I'll never, ever trust them with anything beyond a lolcat, they don't really have any killer features.
The fact that on Windows SkyDrive offers much better user experience than DropBox, the implementation of JIT-downloading files, the fact it hasn't messed around with ASLR in my web browser.
I gather dropbox is better if you run OSX, but at the end of the day having 1% of windows market is better than 10% of OSX market.
I'm sharing some vacations photos with Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone and Linux users.
The only one lacking a first party client is Linux. There are 3rd party ones serving it.
For simple sharing, it can be done entirely in a web browser. In fact for photo sharing SkyDrives web-based offering is much better than dropbox, from handling of exif/geotags to the whole commenting and such.
Most apps I use, will happily use SkyDrive, DropBox or Google Drive. As a business, why would you ever tie yourself to the fait of one. The 'key risk' is simply to great to be tied entirely to one vendor or platform. It is one of the best arguments for making AppStore Apps multi-platform.
Which brings me back to my original point. SkyDrive has some better features, even if you only use OSX. Both Google Drive and Sky Drive are working on converging the web-app space. When people are just in a browser the word / excel / ppt / etc document editing ability (all free) is considerably better than google docs.
For sharing simple photo album, its much better, especially if you want to share with someone who can edit. It also blurs into almost facebook territory with the comment system too, but has better privacy.
I can't think of one feature in fact that would make think Hmm DropBox is the best for this. As I don't have a mac to compare, combined with my deep loathing of the UX/Design Language of OSX, I have only glanced over the feature sheet. Can't see anything SkyDrive is missing on OSX that dropbox offers.
That depends if you're talking about the host OS or the guests. There are plenty of people running Ubuntu instances on Azure.
I use FreeBSD with Samba, but I only have 500 at my current site with a mix of iPads, PCs, and OS X.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/663402/what-are-the-diffe...
That sort of deployment, where you have say a call center with 1,500 people sitting in front of a PC to look up orders and such on their desk. You can update all of them, make sure none of them can surf outside to random web sites, etc.
It is also useful in a large technology enterprise where you have many developers. (Say a large C# shop of contract coders) because the tools help manage workstation build environments etc. When you are a mixed shop it is less useful.
Basically if all of your IT needs can be met by Microsoft products, they have a good story about how you can deploy them, manage them, and maintain them. There isn't a solid open source equivalent. Part of Google's strategy there is 'Chromebook' since if you're running a bunch of terminals that makes things easier to centrally manage.
If you were going to build something in the FOSS space here it would probably impose some strong limits on customizations in order to work. It would also need a way of disabling 'smart' employees from subverting the system (remember the kids who broke through the restrictions in their school issued ipads?) You have to think in the mindset that your employees are not your friends and may be trying to subvert the system :-) The "ideal" (and I put it in scare quotes because most employees hate it) is a workstation that can only run the tools to do your job, and only browse to sites that help you do your job.
I expect we'll get back to that and there will be a 'soft' network for personal devices which is monitored.
Of course, technically, I can conceptualize that in my own company, I would set up a stock Puppet-based configuration that controlled Debian workstations, build computers, etc. Firewall rules, access rules, login rights, etc - all via puppet.
As much as I'm not a fan of Windows Servers, I understand that they provide a pretty easy, integrated approach. I do wish open source projects would look to that and not think what's available is good enough. People will trade up their Camry for a Lexus, but not willing trade down to a Yaris.
1) although with over 1,000 or 10,000 employees you probably should assume you've hired some damn fools or evil folks - that's just basic numbers
I think a lot of people outside the corporate world have a hard time understanding the virtues of Microsoft because they work on such a small scale or without Security, Compliance, and Regulation concerns that are requisite in Enterprise Environments.
I'm going to presume from your answer that OpenLDAP is not sufficient then? Certainly Linux systems can use LDAP.
- It's far from consensus that a puppy-like system is the best way to manage the settings of all your computers, including desktops. Linux has plenty of other tools for managing multiple computers, and almost nobody uses only one.
- Really, what was MS thinking when they joined email configuration with the desktop settings management? (And ntp, dhcp, and etc?) AD imposes a lot of restriction on how one must organize his services, and just a tiny minority would be content with something like that on Linux.
- There are plenty of yellow pages solutions that people like more than LDAP.
Selling Exchange licences, what else?
> AD imposes a lot of restriction on how one must organize his services
Preventing machine-profile creep is a big concern for me. Every different kind of machine we deploy is one more different configuration we need to manage.
I think the operative word here is "can." Active Directory allows you to actively reject machines from your network that are not part of the Domain and it can prevent you from extricating a machine from the Domain to circumvent restrictions imposed upon the machine, the user, the location, or any other myriad of configurable factors.
It would surprise me if there was something you couldn't do to on a nix machine that you could do with Active Directory on a Windows based PC but the time and maintenance involved are in no way proportional. The full featured and easy to use tool-chain was what made Microsoft great, and they lost that with overly complicated systems in the 2000s but they seem to be getting back on the right path with Powershell and their Core Server administration tools.
Additionally Active Directory is an LDAP provider so it's relatively easy to integrate nix machines into an AD environment.
I think many small businesses are looking at Microsoft's cloud exchange solution to be honest. Works just like exchange (meaning all the mobile devices and apps that expect exchange like outlook still work), isn't expensive, pretty reliable and gives loads of space.
That's partly because the desktop became more irrelevant, while mobile became more relevant, and linux dominates the mobile market. One could say that the it switched from being about "the year of the linux desktop" to "the year of the linux palmtop", and that already happened.
Of course, depending on your point of view, that may just be double speak to obscure original point, which to varying degrees it most certainly is.
Linux failed in the desktop market thus far, and probably will until someone comes up with an OS that is at least as user friendly as OS X and then actually has the ability to get it into users hands.
I don't, necessarily. Or, more accurately, I used to, then I didn't, and now I don't really care.
I long ago realized there's a sweet spot technology when that technology is used enough to be popular in niches, but not enough that skills in it's use and maintenance are commoditized.
Professionally, this results in more demand for your skills. Personally, this allows you to invest some portion of your identity/personality in your choice, especially if your identity is slightly nonconformist (this isn't necessarily a good thing, but it can feel good).
Regardless of what it actually is, my point is that I don't believe we will see the kind of overwhelmingly quick adoption of Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux until somebody makes a laptop or desktop computer that runs Ubuntu, does everything a Mac/Windows machine can do (and I mean EVERYTHING...the only reason I'm not running Linux all the time is because the best DAWs and audio plug-ins are for Mac or Windows), and somehow also markets it to be a cool computer to have. That's the only way they're going to beat Apple at this, by being better.
But that's not going to happen. What will happen, I believe, is that over time, more and more people will gravitate to using Linux as they tire of the limited choice offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft. Hopefully, so many will that major software vendors will begin porting their stuff to Linux, at which time it will become more and more obvious for people to be using it. With Steam for Linux and SteamOS based on Linux, we've already seen some trickles of this in action. I think we'll see more gamers gravitate toward Linux when Steam for Linux gets more popular and if that succeeds, other industries will follow suit.
Maybe history will prove me wrong, but I've got a feeling that Valve isn't quite ready to stop batting 1000.
Most of us are forced to use outlook, because it is our corporate mail server. It is horrible, but our IT guys don't know anything else. Typiclly IT departments are run by who only know microsoft.
From what to what? I see a "47% increase", but was that from $100 to $147, or $100,000,000 to $147,000,000?
Their guess was between 900 million and 1.8 billion, or large but they haven't a clue. 47% should be in the ballpark of a few hundred million.
If you ask a source like Yahoo who see's real data, you would know thats not true. If Bing is making an impact Yahoo would not be going out of way to avoid Bing.
CPC is down due to lower CPC's on Mobile. Isn't it public knowledge?
Their online division giving Google some heat is all well and good but that Wintel thing is still their bread and butter - alienating all their hardware partners by doing Surface and buying Nokia is a big deal and a great gambit if it works out - but so far its failing and seems desperate. Their position is increasingly precarious.
I don't think they are doomed, I do think they have a very real crisis in leadership and focus.
I guess the more alarming trend is how a lot of tech companies and governments are picking up LTS Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows XP workstations they have had for 10+ years.
I have friends who work in the systems integration space and from their experience they don't see an evidence of this. Was there a number reported anywhere that makes you say this?
Don't know about Amazon but its just a small software company that is known to be stingy to its own people
You're kidding me, right?
In case you didn't bother to read the parent comment, the user was referring to Amazon forcing its users to install Linux instead of Windows.
That statement is not borne out by data. Apple’s iPhone revenues and market share have continued to rise since inception. Please remember that Apple was never the biggest phone manufacturer. In the last couple of years, iPhone (and in general, smartphone) growth has mainly come from people switching from feature phones. The rest came at the expense of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. The number of people switching from iPhone to Android is negligible on the whole.
In the last reported quarter by Apple, in which the iPhone offerings were awaiting a refresh, Apple sold 20% more iPhones compared to the same quarter last year. Unit sales reached an all-time high for the June quarter.
Google, on the other hand, is extremely bizarre. They have excellent engineers and they have a ton of high-impact applications and services. But they are utterly clueless when it comes to dealing with customers, so they have yet to significantly diversify beyond their revenue models from a decade ago. Google has at least 3 separate multi-billion dollar businesses locked away within their company (in addition to search/ads) but they still don't know how to make use of them or bring them to maturity.
It's stuff like this that makes you appreciate the companies that get everything right.
The total revenue from everything that isn't search, motorolla, or internet backbone transport is only about 5% of gross revenue. If they were better at interfacing with customers and better at making and selling actual products that slice could easily be half the company, if not more.
GMail isn't bad, but ultimately doesn't have half the features you can get for a SME on Exchange, simple things like stopping people emailing a document outside of the organisation. Very important (often a legal/contractual requirement) are simply not possible.
Cloud Hosting? Amazon and MS are out infront.
The thing they've got sewn up is YouTube, but the oddity about that is how awful the search / navigation on the site is. Like imgur they have a brand that people see embedded, I'm fairly sure people click on Reddit imgur links which they wouldn't for an un-known domain host.
But that doesn't mean a competitor can't come along and destroy them. In the rather profitable (and technically un-challenging) world of Meme Generation, we saw the incumbent cast aside this year, amongst some bad publicity. The same could easily happen to youtube.
So instead they stay cuddled up in their warm little search / ad revenue hidey hole where it's comparatively easy for them to dominate the market. While they chase facebook out of a false understanding of what the next generation of big computing corporations are going to look like. It's almost as though google, as a company, has some sort of institutionalized autism. Gdocs is a five year old project and yet it's stuck mired in mediocrity. But have you ever seen people trying to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet using sharepoint? It's a travesty.
As for youtube, they're clearly dominating the market in every way, except for the ones that matter. They don't understand the commitment it will take to turn youtube into a true competitor to HBO and netflix, not just in eyeball-hours but also in revenue generation.
Google refuses to make good on the innovations they've made (or bought) while at the same time they are incapable of trailblazing legitimately novel things. In some ways it's charitable to compare them to the bumbling, myopic Microsoft, because at least MS was capable of executing well into multiple different business areas (office, dev tools, servers, email, etc.) It's sad seeing so much talent going to waste.
What do you think about the importance of this announcement, given your training?
No, I can't because I don't follow Microsoft as a stock. The analogy is that while I am able to program in Java, that doesn't mean I'm qualified to evaluate a particular code base written in Java without investing substantial time to research it. The analogy is not perfect of course - since most of the time people writing code aren't purposely trying to obfuscate it like people who write accounting statements are trying to do.
Microsoft presented only a summary level of revenue statement for a quarter indicating both GAAP and non-GAAP adjusted figures and you are telling us you need time to research to make a contribution here even though you've already said others are not qualified to contribute?
By your analogy I will be surprised if I show a 15-line Java Class to a Java programmer and he tells me he needs to research it to make sense of it.
By comparison, Microsoft presented a single Java Class [revenue statement] not a codebase[Financial Report]
by the way: so far you haven't made any contribution to the discussion even though others have asked you nicely to.
My opinion? Microsoft is expanding revenue but losing it's core business slowly. I think they'll look pretty good for the next couple of years until viable competitors to Office come along. All these other sources of revenue are contingent upon their traction in enterprise, something that's unlikely to change in the short or medium term but when it does will very unpleasant for them.
I don't think this will happen so soon. OO still looks&feels like from 90-ies, has only basic functionality, and MS Office's data formats are sufficiently complex (and probably also intermingled with implementation details) that I don't see a 100%-compatible importer being developed anytime soon.
Who is more pompous? The people thinking they are intrinsically expert at financial analysis posting here or the person that points out how silly they sound?
Seriously, picture a real financial analyst with no computer background reading your Ruby code and drawing all kinds of nonsensical conclusions from it. You'd probably laugh your head off when they read a comment in the code and thought that it was a functional instruction. That's the type of things developers are doing here with their armchair financial analysis.
Saying "you're wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very helpful and most people will simply ignore the statement.
The same can be said for this- I can look at it as a developer and get a general idea of how Microsoft is doing. I may not know all the intricacies behind it, but that doesn't mean my input should be thrown into the trash.
you gotta try to get better at it.
...with no counterargument, specific instance, or even evidence of their own credentials. I can tell you how silly you sound because I'm a Harvard trained economist, and unless you were also trained at Harvard, you're clearly unqualified to read a MS press release.
I've heard these sort of claims before, coming from financially oriented colleagues. I hate it when they make these kinds of dismissive pronouncements. The worst thing you could ever do is plainly state that a thing is simply too complicated to be worth explaining.
If these arcane statements should be regarded as esoteric hieroglyphics by the uninitiated, at least tell us which one is the sun god?
Seriously, we're all pretty curious types around here, and even when the material is bone dry and stale as Soviet bread, we all enjoy learning. At least I know I do.
After working in finance-related IT for 16 years, I signed up for the Level 1 CFA exam to take it in December of 2009. I've been in IT for 20 years but I thought, "How hard could this be?" I found out. I ended up studying for over 350 hours and was thankfully one of the 33% of people that passed the test when I took it. 67% of people that took the test failed it.
So I ask you - how much of those 350 hours of studying do you think I can squeeze in a Hacker News comment? Do you think you could teach a financial analyst how to analyze Java code in a Hacker News comment? Would you take the time to even try?
(using Python as an example) def function(): This is a "unit" of code which performs an action. raise Exception(): This means something bad happened. ...etc.
droneStrikes is asking for something along these lines. We're not expecting to become experts at financial analysis after reading a paragraph, but we'd at least like to leave more informed than when we arrived.
As an analogy, becoming a commercial pilot requires 1500 hours of flying time and hundreds of additional hours of studying outside of this for exams and checkrides. This is 5 times the amount of preparation you needed for your Level 1 CFA exam. Just about every time there is a crash of a commercial flight, you will hear remarkable insights from these guys that will usually help explain the situation. Here is a great example with a commercial pilot's take on the Asiana crash that killed 2 people at SFO: http://wgnradio.com/2013/07/08/analysis-of-asiana-airlines-f...
I can only hope that the countless hours you've devoted to finance would be able to provide you some insights into something as fundamental as a quarterly earnings report.
Otherwise, your comment sounds suspiciously like conversational terrorism, specifically the first item on this list:
As an actual CFA charterholder, I can tell you any analyst I work with would have laughed out loud at someone bragging about passing level 1. It means you have roughly an undergrad level understanding of finance.
Can you tell me what IT certification tests you have passed? You may have missed the fact that I've been in IT for 20 years, remain in IT and will always be in IT.
I'm sure a native Spanish speaker wouldn't be too impressed with my ability to speak Spanish either. But I would hope they would have more class than to "laugh out loud" at a native English speaker putting forth significant effort at learning their language.
MSFT is both a tech company and a utility.
It has growth potential (phones, surface, search, xbox) but it is also completely essential for global business (servers, AD, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint).
In that sense it is a utility. If you took out all the MSFT software in the world everything basically stops. Your electricity probably doesn't work, you probably can't get on a train to get to work and if you manage to get to work you can't login to anything.
People say "but my company has BYOD!" that might be true, but MSFT is still the infrastructure it is running on. You can bring your AAPL car but you're still driving on an MSFT road.
- 1st quarter of last year: $16.01 billion
- 2nd quarter of last year: $21.46 billion
- 3rd quarter of last year: $20.49 billion
- 4th quarter of last year: $19.90 billion
- 1st quarter of this year: $18.53 billion (the "record" one)
Google is similar in the fact that a lot of what they do depends on internet ad revenue.
I don't see how anybody can assail their stranglehold on the cubicle market.
But to say they are dependent on their OS for revenue is silly.
SQL Server income is not dependent on the OS -- anything can talk to it. Their cloud solution is not dependent on their OS. Search. Even Lync and Office can be used with other operating systems.
But it doesn't matter. Even if everyone stopped buying and using Windows tomorrow /Microsoft/ could still use it. MSSQL is not dependent on a thriving market for Windows. Anyone that needed to administer the machine could just RDP into it.
While I have no doubt they'll survive another 20 or 30 years, they no longer have the power and mind-share they once had.
Now with google/apple catching up, they probably can move a bit faster without consult lawyers in every single move.
On the other hand, with so much cash/profit, the employees/managers have no hurry to move too fast anyway. The share holders might not be too happy.
RIM was a one trick pony. Microsoft has several billion dollar businesses.
Critics of Microsoft are wrong to call it's enterprise business a dinosaur. There is no reason to think Microsoft won't continue to grow this business for decades to come.
But I would like to be able to own this as a pure play, not mixed up with XBOX. Let's call this company "Azure" and spin it off, like HP did with Agilent (which should have been called HP), and let the "devices and services" part screw around with reinventing itself.
If anyone is surprised by this, then that person has not been reading Microsoft's financial statements.
Windows revenues were also down year-over-year in Q4 of fiscal 2013, and in Q3 of fiscal 2013, and in Q1 of fiscal 2013. (Non-GAAP in all cases, to back out the effect of revenue deferrals.)
As for RIM, I don't see what it has to do with Microsoft. RIM didn't have platform lock-in -- all they had was email.
In contrast, analysts estimate that IBM still derives 40% of its profits from mainframes. ("Estimate" because IBM plays accounting games to minimize the contribution of mainframes.)
Well, the price cut is another symptom of decreasing market appeal. But it does make the number less useful.
"Costs associated with each sale" are irrelevant when considering revenue.
If you spend $400 to make a $500 sale, it's the same as if you spend $100 to make a $500 sale. Both are $500 in revenue. What's different is income, which is revenue minus costs.
[1] http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/html/pbPage....
It wouldn't look good to play the Surface write-off trick twice in a row.
And, of course, defacto server-side OS is Linux. So-called Desktop will be theirs for a long long time, but not because the OS is of any good - it is meaningless a bloatware, but because of word.exe and excel.exe which it seems to be here forever.
As for their services, well, forcing sheeple to use IE and Bing by re-writing their browser's settings doesn't account for even for popularity. IE is crap compared to Chrome, and even some sheeple could see that, but most of them just doesn't know any better, so they got stuck with IE and Bing.
And to appreciate the absurdity, just look what is happening with all those Java apps, which are supposed to run everywhere, with each new release of Windows, which are supposed to be 100% backward-compatible.)
Is it? Sure it's fairly defacto for public facing web servers, but servers in general? Given how hugely popular Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server and, to a lesser extent, Sharepoint is I imagine that Windows servers are pretty darn popular (or at least common). You just don't see them if all you're looking at is public facing web servers.
Well, really good tools like Go allows the same server-side code to be ran under Windows, the real question is what for?
We can't use public cloud. Need our own private hardware for legal reasons.
The load isn't high, we have a high value per client, low client count business model.
The ease at which I can have a private cloud. Data replication and clustering, full Hot-Hot style DR solution, hosting on MS technologies is great.
I can get due diligence sign off from SQL Server which I could not for say Postgre, this would be due to the fact the replication component isn't vetted and considered secure/authoritative by my clients.
Then I do the maths, once bizspark ends, the total cost for all these licenses is going to be about $30k per year. We hope to have revenues of about thirty times that by then.
But better than all that. How long does it take to set up this replicating, elastic cloud, with replicated database? Not even a day.
I couldn't do that with Oracle!
Bizspark means right now that we don't have to worry about the costs compared to going VMware.
Now in the world of startups whom have 100,000 users to make $10, then yes, the cost of these technologies is going to be hard to justify!
Did you try actually failing it over ?
I've not yet linked it up to the build quality (which I want to do) and I'm also thinking of making a more Windows Focused Chaos Monkey OS project. I dislike the idea of testing only that a VM stops. I want to see what happens if I hammer say its CPU with a few higher priority threads. Or simulate insane network latency, or some other networking quirk.
I worry I am only testing against very well behaved nodes disappearance.
Ultimately I'll have a nice little dashboard, which allows me to switch instance between UAT2/PROD, that shows me the available reserve for each environment. I'm toying with making some OWIN extension that allows me to control which components are loaded. For example, we have a 'chat' component, which is obviously not essential. I'd love the idea of automatically failing that. As we add more value add features, certain models and the like which are CPU demanding, these features will not have any uptime guarantee, so I'd like to automatically throttle them, in the case of a catastrophic failure (like a DC loosing connectivity).
I am looking for something 99.999%. I've got three physical separate DC sites, each DC site has 3 or more servers. We could run the entire system on one server, easily.
http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=microsoft%2C+window...
For comparison there is the trend for 'iphone' and 'android'.
Sure Microsoft are doing loads of exciting things but people aren't typing 'Microsoft' or 'Windows' into the search engine box of Google as much as they used to. Make of that what you will.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=windows+safe+mode#q=w...
My point is that, yeah, getting conclusions from that is hard...
I'm interested in following those Surface numbers over the course of the next year. If they can get that revenue up to about a billion, they will have done very well. And I think they can do it.
They are growing more cows and expanding their offerings to other herds (see Java support, node.js support, Linux support, ...).
Factually speaking, some of us here don't want to believe that, especially if we work for Microsoft.
Or are you saying that Microsoft's products will be overtaken by others?
Microsoft has a good thing going in enterprise as their boxes are much easier to manage en masse and it works well together. I do not think they are threatened as much by cloud services like Gmail, Google Docs as much as people think. They simply say to their entrenched enterprise customers in which things are working for them "We offer cloud Exchange and cloud Office" I think MS has the enterprise community on lock and they are moving in the direction to transition them to online services.
Also known as the Wile E. Coyote Syndrome.
Also known as the even a broken clock is right twice a day syndrome. :)
That lack of leadership sealed their fate.
Google and Netflix are firing on all cylinders not placating Wall Street with short term profit surges.
microsoft is not as deep in a mess, yet it's really good to be aware of the fact that sometimes rising profits means you're milking the last drops from the cow.
1. Accelerate Ballmer booting out process. Why's he still there?
2. Boost Cloud.
3. Boost enterprise services and everythings.
4. Stop wasting resources on stupid consumer widgets department.