Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Second Quarter | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Reports Record Revenue of $24.52 Billion in Second Quarter

microsoft.com

163 pointsharryzhang181 comments

Like many on HN, I'm not a fanatic MS guy (despite having a deep C# background) but I'm happy to see them do well this past quarter. They've only had a series of bad PR recently, epitomized by the CEO stepping down being the highlight story of the year.

But this doesn't talk about specifics. Consumer devices? I don't really understand which product is doing so well for them? I know it's anecdotal but I still have yet to hear someone recommend a microsoft product in the last 6-12 months. The only people that bought their phone were people that bought because of price point.

Can someone shed some light on what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants? I'm really curious now.

>The only people that bought their phone were people that bought because of price point.

Not really. I bought my Lumia Phone and Surface pro for its features and also because it did seem to solve a few of my pains. The main selling point for a Nokia Lumia was the camera, I don't think any other phone on the market can match that. Its also simple enough to use, has offline radio and maps so I don't have to hunt for a 4g/wifi. As for the Surface Pro, its is a great device when travelling, fun + getting work done and my laptop automatically syncs up the changes to my laptop with BitSync when I am back.

I bought their phone (920) because I like the UI, I don't have to put a case on it, I like the camera, and it can run programs that I write. I didn't pay for it; I traded my iphone 4s with a friend for it. I am going to upgrade for a 1020 once I'm eligible with my carrier.

> has offline maps so I don't have to hunt for a 4g/wifi

You just about immediately sold me on a windows phone with those words. "Offline maps" as someone who travels in europe yes please.

I travel in Europe a lot, but Google Maps for Android has had the ability to save offline maps for ages now (which I use all the time). GPS also works offline obviously so you can navigate pretty well (still no search for offline though). In the latest version (7.5 I think) you just get the area you want to save in screen, click the search bar and scroll down to the bottom to see the option. I think it works on iOS too but you might need to use the "OK Maps" easter egg.

That Google think this is an appropriate UI for this feature tells you everything you need to know about the state of design there.

> get the area you want to save in screen, click the search bar and scroll down to the bottom to see the option.

That is going to be really useful, it doesn't allow me to search even for something as simple as "home". It does let me zoom right in and keeps names of important landmarks intact like rail stations.

Thanks for the tip.

I've had good luck with a handful of offline map apps for Android...like GPS CoPilot. Got me through 2 weeks on the road in Ireland (a country with the most absurd address system imaginable, so bad most of the locals just give out Lat Longs)

Doesn't the OpenStreetMap Android app do offline as well? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand

Sort of yes. OSM maps of thickly populated areas are great.

I don't know about routing / navigation, though.

> what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants?

Continuity.

If you have a full Windows shop, with hundreds or thousands of users on Active Directory, with e-mail and calendars on Exchange, all their important documents made in Office and stored on SharePoint, all their internal apps in VB/C# storing their data on SQL Server (or Oracle running on Windows Server) you'll have a hard time selling anything much different. It's always easier to upgrade to a newer release of Windows than to Linux or OSX.

Microsoft has perfected the art of vendor lock-in. I believe only IBM's zOS customers "enjoy" a similar situation.

Or perhaps it's because they have solutions, features, industry leading backwards-compatibility, competent support channels, and a slew of other things - that their nearest competitor does not have.

I assume you mean their nearest competitor for consumer and small to medium business desktop operating systems? Because that statement isn't true for say, mobile phones, video game systems, cloud services, or database, enterprise, and web server software.

Right, now that Postgres 9.3 just added materialized views, perhaps they'll have a super-easy system for replication, DR, and HA.

Microsoft offers product to compete at many different levels of the market. Postgres is their competition for some needs, but I would think that if you need more advanced features like you mention it would be more of a comparison to Oracle and db2.

"We have to make them need us!"

Is it easier to switch from the LAMP stack or RoR to other platforms? Or Java to other languages? Switching costs are always high in technology, not sure what your point is. Not to mention there are no credible better alternatives to AD and Exchange except maybe hand over all and data to a third party with G apps.

If you want to switch from LAMP on Red Hat to LAMP on Ubuntu or even on Windows, it's easy because most, if not all, of the pieces are there. It's not so with Windows desktop or web apps - the pieces are proprietary and many of them don't run on anything other than Windows.

I still have yet to hear someone recommend a microsoft product in the last 6-12 months

I think this is a common fallacy, especially after the Apple phenomenon. We assume that just because people aren't rushing to recommend the products they are using, those products aren't selling. That is not necessarily true, especially once you account for the many different motivations behind product purchase.

As I think about the most recommended product in different categories, those companies/products are not the leading ones in their category. It tells me that not being highly recommended does not equal sucking.

I've personally heard recommendations for Surface and Windows phones.

I've only seen one person using a Surface.. but they work for Microsoft.

Maybe things are different in Silicon Valley vs. everywhere else.

Last time I went to the Microsoft store to get a replacement for my Surface keyboard, they were all sold out; so were all the Best Buy stores in South Florida except two far-flung ones. So people are definitely buying the Surface, at least the Pro one..

I highly recommend the Surface if you are curious about Windows 8.1 and want something with a highly portable 10" form factor. I think many coders would find 10" a bit annoying to work on, but I've managed to fill up every space I inhabit with monitors and stuff to make it a bit easier on the eyes.

I bought a Surface Pro 2 last week and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. It's a jack of all trades, master of none, but it's already my go-to device for everything.

Have you used it for note taking? I am looking for the master of text + equation + diagram note taking and I thought surface pro might be it.

Thanks

I bought it partly to be a note taking machine in meetings. I have no experience with taking notes on any type of tablet or laptop and it still hasn't clicked for me, but that's not a problem with the Surface.

The type cover is surprisingly good. I've owned laptops with worse keyboards. It's a little loose balanced on your lap (although it's workable) but fine on a desk. I need to get a Bluetooth mouse though because the touchpad is terrible (and of course very few desktop apps are comfortable when using touch/pen).

I find drawing on the screen is a little weird because it doesn't have the friction of pen and paper, but it's comfortable to hold and write. I've tried styluses on iOS and the Wacom pen is just miles better.

I've tried 4 programs and apps. OneNote (Modern app) is pretty good for handwritten notes. It does pretty much everything the desktop version does. Evernote (Modern app) is like the iPad version, i.e. very stripped down and it doesn't support pen input. Of course you can use the full desktop app, which does support ink notes. Windows Journal is a bit of a legacy; so far I prefer OneNote for handwritten entries and mind maps but Journal is the only packaged program that does handwriting recognition. There's a desktop app for handwritten math formula entry but I haven't used it. Finally, because I take notes in mind map format, I've installed the desktop XMind, where the UI does not scale on a high-DPI screen, but if you know the keyboard shortcuts it's usable.

So honestly, right now, it's not the magic note taking machine I'd hoped for. I'm finding myself using XMind the most. You don't need a Surface for that - I could have got a MacBook Air 11 instead, or simply stuck with wide format paper. I'm starting to use OneNote a bit more though. YMMV.

If that was all I used it for it would be a disappointment, but in just over a week this thing (that I'm typing on now) has completely replaced my 15" laptop, tablet and taken over a lot of the duties I'd normally do on my phone.

I have a few students using Surfaces. If you can stand Windows 8, they're pretty nice.

My recent experience is that Windows 8 is a very good touch-based operating system, and I don't just mean as a tablet OS. If you've only used it with a mouse I can understand your scepticism, but on a tablet or laptop with a touch screen (and maybe even touch-screen desktops) a lot of the weird things suddenly makes sense.

Surface Pros will run Ubuntu allegedly. Could make for a slick unit, although the cover keyboards don't look as good as a regular keyboard.

try the "type cover" keyboard. its not a regular keyboard but really thin and a nice balance.

All Microsofts' interns got surface pros as gifts, I see them in all my CS classes.

Guessing this is USA? This did not happen for UK based interns , only full time employees received surfaces as gifts over here.

Overseas always takes the short straw. In Brazil, the technical consultants I knew always complained about the hardware they got. Sales people got all the nice stuff.

That's interesting, it was the opposite here with all the developers having workstations and spec'ed up laptops whereas sale/marketing would be given some generic thinkpad.

I would of thought Brazil may be changing as they were getting a new office there and hiring when I was at the company.

To be fair, last time I had someone close in a technical role in Brazil was a while ago. Things could have changed since they got relocated (mostly to the US).

Yeah it's pretty easy to spot the Microsoft interns after that gift haha.

Sure beats the Zune I got a bunch of years ago.

In the midwest, I've been to a handful of information security conferences in the past six months and I've seen at least two Surface Pro tablets at each one. When I ask about them, the users say their work has provided them.

May be it's only me but back when I used to work in Seattle, if I found someone with a windows mobile/surface the first thing I brought up to start a conversation was, How are things at Microsoft ? Like it up there and I was only wrong one instead of ~ 15-20 times I brought this up.

But the strong sales numbers almost every quarter seems to suggest otherwise. Good going MS.

Not in SV here, I see them...occasionally. Maybe in a week of coffee shop stops I'll see 2 or 3.

Office 365, Bing advertisements, Surface tablets (they say they doubled their revenue from Surface in the last year), Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Xbox One, Microsoft human input devices (mice and keyboards), Windows upgrades (consumer and OEM), Skydrive, support and licensing, SQL Server, Windows Server in general, Skype, Exchange... the list goes on.

The list could be practically endless, but Azure should probably be listed too.

Certainly. Azure is way behind AWS in the startup scene, but Microsoft is pushing Azure into the enterprise, with good features such as service bus and VPN to connect internal networks with cloud services. The list of Azure services is growing rapidly. Microsoft is also bundling Azure hosting with enterprise agreements, which effectively gives enterprises a substantial free tier.

They doubled their surface revenue in the last quarter, they never released last year's surface revenue

> &hey doubled their surface revenue in the last quarter, they never released last year's surface revenue*

They said that Surface revenue doubled sequentially.

Sequentially means compared to the last quarter -- not the year-ago quarter.

From the earnings release:

> Surface revenue more than doubled sequentially, from $400 million in the first quarter to $893 million in the second quarter.

Whoops, my mistake!

> Can someone shed some light on what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants? I'm really curious now.

Operating systemwise? An unbelievably vast software ecosystem and a highly performant, user friendly, highly hardware tolerant, flexible OS. There are things I like to do that are either impossible or such a giant PIA on my rMBP that I just don't do them. Coming from Windows-land, the software ecosystem on Macs, especially the kind of hobbyist software I like to monkey around with, feels like a barren wasteland comparatively.

Don't get me wrong, I love my rMBP, and I get my work done on it well enough, it's the best portable virtualization hardware I've ever owned and the second Apple laptop I've owned. But I've also realized that I spend 95% of my time on it either SSH'd into something else, in a browser or using software that's also available on Windows (and often works better, like Office of Chrome). I can do those things with hardware that's 1/5th the cost and have it be almost exactly as performant for those use-cases.

For my next laptop, if I can find a high quality portable Windows laptop with good virtualization characteristics I'd be 50/50 on not buying another Apple product because of the things I have to set aside due to the spare software ecosystem. There's also enough day-to-day irritants and workarounds with the hardware and especially OS X (and especially the stinking pile of garbage that is Finder) that I find I spend most of my time trying to avoid the OS. For portability and form factor, a Surface Pro 2 is definitely something I'm considering as a next portable.

It seems these days, Apples get used in software development and server admin functions or among liberal arts students. And for the typical users (not the HN crowd) justifying an expensive price tag for marginally better portability for something that gets used mostly as a glorified web browsing terminal and Word/Excel computer is not a smart purchase decision for most consumers.

Curious, what hobbyist software do you play with that has a better Windows presence than on OSX?

I don't think your characterization of most Apple users is fair, either. Here's an analogy: my neighbor thinks I am an utter fool because instead of buying a 1995 Honda Accord for $50 from the junkyard and overhauling it in my garage, I bought a newish car for way more money. I value more in a vehicle than its ability to transport my body from point a to b. To him, this is idiocy.

Put more explicitly, owning what I think is the most beautiful piece of computer hardware money can buy is worth more than zero dollars to me. A lot of people seem to feel the same. And that's just the hardware, but you get the point.

I'd like to add to this. It's the little things that i like about my macbook pro. The magsafe has saved my laptop several times. Optical audio out makes music so much more enjoyable. The trackpad is easily worth 5x as much as the nearest pc laptop that i have used. The battery life is significant - around 38% better than windows 7 on mountain lion, and i'd imagine the situation is even more pronounced on mavericks.

plus the lack of pre installed spyware etc. makes everything just so much more pleasing. I haven't run a virus scan since i got a mac.

I had a 2010 MBP and the magsafe stopped power cord tripping. That wasn't what killed it though. There ate numerous millions of other ways to kill a notebook.

Buying a machine that can survive relatively extreme drops and liquid incursion (for me a ThinkPad) covers way more possibilities than a magsafe cable. In fact I've fallen over the cable and pulled it off the table a few times and it doesn't suffer any damage. I think the wrong end of the problem is saved with the cable design.

I do think the Apple hardware is beyond reproach for the most part. But it should be at the price I'm paying for it. I grab my rMBP for on the go trips before I grab any other laptop I own.

> But it should be at the price I'm paying for it.

Are you talking about the 13" or 15"? As a lifelong PC user I just bought a 13" because the comparable ultraportables costs more than the rMBP. I'm getting better hardware for less money w/ Apple. Look at the new Lenovo X1. They want $2100 for 8GB/256GB!

15". 16GB/256GB. I love the hardware for the most part.

It's a good question, and it's a topic that you simply won't even be exposed to if you're purely an Apple product user.

Setting up your choices as a $50 clunker or a newish car is a false dichotomy that doesn't exist in car purchases and doesn't exist in computing. For $500 I can buy a laptop that will let me do everything I want to do hobbywise. That means I can buy a new one every year for six years, meaning I'll get better hardware every year for more than half a decade, before I hit the price of my bottom spec rMBP I got last year. Are they not as nice pieces of hardware? Sure! But at that price I don't care, I'm getting what I pay for. There is simply no reliable low mileage $3500 used Honda Accord option in the Apple world.

Most Mac software I've run across that I'd describe as "hobbyist" are either ports of open source projects or "scratch an itch because OS X or the default app suite it ships with is broken".

Rather than go into a list that would go on forever, I'd ask this, what hobbyist software communities can you not participate in because you're on a mac?

Think about how many times you or somebody around you has said "doh! too bad I'm on a mac" and then think of that time as the tip of an iceberg with a catalog of whatever software that goes into the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Okay now some examples:

Or consider this one example among thousands. Suppose I'm into old Japanese Games (niche, but there's a hobbyist community around it) and want to play the Sharp X68000 Castlevania Chronicles because it exists nowhere else. I turn to emulation and find at least 5 emulators for the platform on Windows, 2 or 3 of them are actually pretty good. There's 1 for OS X and it doesn't work all that well and the community hasn't even bothered translating the docs from Japanese. Or even worse, for the Playstation 2, there are 0 emulators.

Or suppose I want to participate in the Demoscene, put my coding skills to the test, that sort of thing. In 2013 there were 15 releases in the community. By way of comparison, there were about 20 linux releases in the same time period. On Windows there's been 15 releases this month and something north of 8,000 releases in 2013. The Amiga has a more vibrant community in this milieu than the Macintosh does.

Things are better if you're a musician in the scene, there's a handful of trackers available for OS X, and they're pretty good ones. But let's say I want to support my team and help with making a 4k intro. There are no tools available on the Mac for writing 4k music. That's cool, I'll help out with the regular music and start grabbing VSTis and VSTs...ooooh...95% of the hobbyist community's VST work is done with Windows and they don't work on OS X without a bunch of kludges (if they work at all). Here's the current instructions for a somewhat workable solution http://diaphone.blogspot.de/2010/12/11.html?m=1 on OS X.

And the age-old games ecosystem.

And these are just the 3 hobbies I personally follow. I have an Aunt who has an automated sewing machine and like making patches and things for her grandkids. AFAIK there are zero tools on OS X for this hobby. And the list goes on and on and on.

It's just not a good platform for these kinds of hobbies. If I was really into writing or painting or more "analog" hobbies, OS X is awesome for this. If I was into configuring LAMP stacks and such, it's pretty good. But outside of that it's a near barren wasteland.

I've had a mbp for my last two laptops and I'm done with them as well. Finder, iTunes, the horrorshow that is xcode slay me. My rmbp has been crash happy and refuses to sleep (buggy video drivers). The wireless card has been awful (stops working). And for a business user support for hardware failures is laughable (2 week Depot!)

The only compelling app has been cord. It far and away is a better remote desktop client. Well that and having a real shell.

I've been buying dell latitudes as of late for my devs and they've been awesome. Windows 8 is patently terrible though.

To be fair windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I'm writing something at the moment which returns it to a usable state through group and security policies and registry tweaks. By definition it doesn't add anything to the OS like start menu replacements but it makes it usable for desktop and corporate users.

> especially the kind of hobbyist software I like to monkey around with

I suppose you've tried Linux, too? :)

It turns out, mucking around with server software is not one of my hobbies sadly.

They haven't actually been selling much. They patent-trolled google over some smartphone patents and won. Now they include the billions in revenue as "Windows Phone revenue". AFAIK they make more out of this patent trolling than from actually selling windows phones.

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsofts-newest-billiondollar...

If the patents original disclosure was with mobile in mind then its fair enough to report it as windows phone revenue. It's not the type of win MS would want, but they did invest in the R&D

Unfortunately, that can not be known, since the patent list they use to extort Android device makers is still secret. When Barnes & Noble threatened to make it public, Microsoft settled and entered a billion dollar partnership (in which B&N did basically nothing)

I saw you got downvoted for another comment, but in general you've got the narrative right.

Microsoft sent a patent demand letter to B&N. B&N went public as part of its defense. Microsoft countered with two separate deals:

1) Settled the patent issue privately for a revenue-sharing deal and cash payment.

2) Microsoft committed to invest in the Nook business (called New Corp by B&N) which eventually led to Microsoft purchasing Nook for a premium.

So, while the immediate settlement was probably measured in hundreds of millions, the total outlay from Microsoft shareholders to B&N shareholders was close to 1 billion even though it was spread over multiple and disparate deals.

Prior to the patent letter neither company had a significant relationship.

When you say extort you mean seek payment for licence rights for their IP? I'm not a fan of the system but its part of the business process.

All the big companies take part in this little dance.

It is extortion nevertheless. Or patent racket if you like. B&N described that behavior on their court hearings. MS is coming with threats, and says that no mater what you'll do, even if you'll try to refute some patents, they'll find others, so better pay up right away. It's a classic racketeer behavior, i.e. extortion. If you describe racket a "part of the business process", then it means that something is very seriously wrong there. And it's clear what is very wrong - the patent legal system is severely broken, leaving too many holes for such racketeers like MS.

> When you say extort you mean seek payment for licence rights for their IP

What Microsoft does is very different to that and very arguably close to the definition of extortion.

No, it's really not. Pretty much all large patent portfolios get licensed this way, and always have been. There are a multitude of legal, technical, practical and business reasons, but that's how it goes.

It's just that some companies don't like to pay what's due, which is fine... It's their right and they can settle it in negotiations or in court. The problem is, due to the current media atmosphere that is conducive to inflammatory rhetoric because it garners rageviews, these companies now also like to complain loudly using words like "extortion", which the tech media eagerly parrot. And then others who don't like the licensor (or patents in general) pick up that rhetoric and run with it.

When the patent they used to collect money was invalidated(FAT patent), yet they continue in their ways, the "extortion" word seems to stick :)

That's just one patent that got invalidated. And that required Google to identify one comment from more than a decade back to argue that the patent was obvious (rather than anticipated). All that to kill a single MS patent.

MS has hundreds, probably thousands of patents in their portfolio. A single patent makes negligible difference to the portfolio.

In addition, MS has prevailed in court with several other patents in many other jurisdictions, so clearly they have enforceable patents in their portfolio. That is why they can rightfully continue asking for licenses.

This is one of the "practical" problems of licensing large portfolios that I alluded to. The quality or fate of a single patent does not reflect on the entire portfolio. Conversely, invalidating each patent or valuing each patent is also incredibly complex.

There is an entire field of specialization for valuing portfolios. Calling it extortion is mostly the efforts of one side of the table to exert indirect pressure on the other

I think it was $300 million, not a billion, right?

http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com/press_releases/10_4_12_bks_...

It was a bit more complex than that, but I can't find the billion number.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230391690...

In any case, they settled for a negative value a lawsuit alleging B&N violated Microsoft patents. If that doesn't send a message about what those patents are, I can't imagine what would.

Not sure why the other comment was killed, but it seemed to list them: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsoft-barnes-noble/

This list is not a complete one

B&N gave them a stake in the eBook business for $300M. That's not nothing. That is an instant entry into the eBook business for Microsoft. Compare that to the huge amounts of time and money and legal fighting and publisher wrangling the other players (Amazon, Apple and Google) had to invest.

It's not secret [1].

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070611-microsoft-andro...

This is not the complete list.

There's also a bubble effect if you live in California/US. I remember showing the Nokia N900 around SF a few years ago and nobody had heard of it, while in Europe it had received quite a bit of press. The old marketing and commercial infrastructure from Nokia is still in place in many countries over here.

I distinctly remember, in early 2013, a friend of mine telling me his partner had bought a Lumia "and it's quite good, really". A lot of people still buy phones for the looks and included minutes, so a good commercial network can still move quite a few units regardless of tech hype.

The Surface Pro devices have received strongly positive reviews for the right applications. They are expensive and a little niche, but are nonetheless impressive machines.

Windows Phone looks like something I'd like to give a try, especially given the spotty experience I've had with Android so far. And if I were to get a tablet, I'd definitely look into a Surface Pro (once they aren't so expensive).

Perhaps I'm less of an Anything-But-Microsoft guy than most around here.

There's a growing number of cheap 8-inch Windows 8 tablets like the Dell Venue Pro. Only 32-bit and 2GB of RAM but they work well as tablets and you can use them with Bluetooth keyboards. They run desktop software but screen elements are really small so you may want to add a couple of big monitors for more serious uses. The Asus Transformer T100 is also worth a look.

I absolutely love the Venue 8 Pro I received from my wife for Christmas. It is quite remarkable and liberating to have a full PC in such a tiny form factor. Put simply, it can do anything my desktop PC can aside from display dozens of windows simultaneously. And of course it's not as fast as my 3770K. But it's shockingly fast for such a small device thanks to Bay Trail. And Windows 8.1 does the "tablet" thing really well at that size.

A bit of anecdata: My niece got a cheap laptop last year for homework with Windows 8 on it. This christmas she asked 'santa' for a windows phone, because she's used to the interface. And this is in a household where everyone's had iPod Touchs and access to an iPad for years.

So there at least, the 'make everything metro' strategy seems to have worked out.

Never underestimate the power of cheap, near disposable hardware for children.

Buying a $3k laptop for anybody younger than a college student just doesn't make a lot of sense with the kind of wear and tear a kid puts a computer through. Most families I know end up having to buy a new laptop for their kid every year. It's far less painful when that laptop is <$800.

Hell, here's an awesome laptop I'd be thrilled to have if I were 15 and it's $500. http://www.costco.com/HP-Pavilion-TouchSmart-15z-Laptop-%7c-...

Despite many hardcore techies (like us) dismissing the Surface, it's actually quite appealing for certain segments of the casual marketplace. That and the Xbox are probably the main (hardware) sellers.

I love my Surface 2. I have a couple iPads and Android tablets (if you count the Kindle Fire) in a drawer here and wouldn't trade my Surface for all four of them if I had to choose.

What about the Surface is unappealing to "hardcore techies"?

I consider myself something of a hardcore techie and I am very happy with my Surface Pro. Although I have high-spec workstations both at home and the office, the Surface Pro is a terrific form factor for carrying to work and back every day as a pedestrian commuter. It's great to have with me in case I have to do some work away from my workstations.

As a thick tablet, the Pro is stunningly fast compared to other tablets. With the keyboard, it's up to any task I'd throw at an ultrabook. The touchscreen is totally natural and fitting for such a small device. It's great to be able to just click UI buttons with your finger on the screen, even in the "laptop" orientation. The battery life is more than enough for my use-case.

I don't use the stylus much—I wish it had slightly better precision.

What achievements must I unlock to earn the hardcore techie badge? Maybe I'm still a few shy.

Windows 8. Touchscreen. It's not altogether unappealing, but I feel like its main selling points are aimed at the casual user who doesn't own a desktop or laptop already (or just have a work laptop).

I don't particularly care for Windows 8/touchscreens either, but:

Windows 8: Though I have very limited experience with this, it seems like it was born to run on a tablet.

Touchscreen: I think touchscreens in general are inefficient and clumsy, but... pretty much every device these days has a screen as a primary/secondary method in input. I don't see how this sets the Surface apart from any other modern mobile device. Perhaps you mean that the Surface's touchscreen, in particular, isn't very good?

The Windows Phone OS usually gets pretty good reviews. The lack of premium phone hardware parts until recently made MS create a very lightweight but pleasing OS. But it still suffers from a lack of app selection. And for me, I personally prefer the customizability of Android.

If you're a camera geek though, the new high-end Windows phone are very appealing...

If you want the actual report, that's here:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00011931251401...

What everyone wants? Xbox one. I liked the Surface Pro 2 too . Just wish it were a tad cheaper.

Apparently not everyone as the PS4 is dominating right now: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2014/01/23/why-ps4-is-sellin...

That's not what domination looks like.

It looks more like this : http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2011/02/06/worldwide-hardware-sa... (from 2010) where the Wii was 50% more units.

If that's the case isn't Sony set to report similar profits? From what I've read the PS4 is outselling Xbox One pretty substantially (even though Xbox One is selling quite well).

Can it really be attributed to XboxOne and Surface? I'm really curious too.

>> Can it really be attributed to XboxOne and Surface?

Hardly the Xbox One, consoles generally lose money on the hardware for year(s) after release.

Otoh, the revenue was the record and not the profits? For that, more hardware certainly helps.

Edit: polyomino has a point, it seems components + build are about the same as the sales price (but not including e.g. transports and profit for the shops selling them). Edit 2: What tanzam75 said.

This generation, the xbox one hardware is being sold for profit. I think the ps4 as well, although with much slimmer margins.

> This generation, the xbox one hardware is being sold for profit.

IHS estimates the Xbox One's BOM + manufacturing cost = $471. Add in the retailer's margin plus the cost of the retail supply chain, and Microsoft is probably selling the Xbox One at a small loss.

They'll make their real profit on the games. As will Sony.

I recommend the Surface 2 Pro.

Surface Pro 2

Why is price point not a valid way to sell a product?
Remember why Henry Ford was such a big deal?

I own a Lumia 925 and I highly recommend it.

I just moved from Android to Windows Phone, went with the Lumia 925 as well.
Having used it for a month now, I like it. Maybe missing some apps (Sonos was one I was looking for and disappointed, for example.) But on the whole, I am happy with the phone. Feels quite polished.

Do you mind elaborating a bit more in-depth on Android vs. WP?

seeing how nokia tanked after disappointing earnings this quarter, we can safely assume that windows phones were not the driving factor for Microsoft.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=nokia&ei=baPhUrjeEuGgiALHqQ...

> I don't really understand which product is doing so well for them?
Isn't it server related software, e.g. SQL-Server, Exchange, and so forth?
Perhaps some Office and some Windows 8 licenses, too. Both are good cash cows.
This much is likely: it's not Bing, nor the Surface, nor Windows Phone, nor the XBox…

Bing, Surface, Windows Phone and Xbox are all listed in the financials as doing pretty well. Quoting:
Windows OEM revenue declined 3%, reflecting strong 12% growth in Windows OEM Pro revenue, offset by continued softness in the consumer PC market.
Surface revenue more than doubled sequentially, from $400 million in the first quarter to $893 million in the second quarter.
The company sold 7.4 million Xbox console units into the retail channel, including 3.9 million Xbox One consoles and 3.5 million Xbox 360 consoles.
Bing search share grew to 18.2% and search advertising revenue grew 34%.
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...

Indeed, but the follow-up list and the subsequent quote seemed more in line with Microsoft has been doing (or trying to do) in the past decade:
> "We significantly outpaced enterprise IT spend as we continue to take share from our competitors by delivering the devices and services our customers need as they transition to the cloud,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. “Our commercial cloud services revenue grew more than 100% year-over-year, as customers are embracing Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics CRM Online, and making long-term commitments to the Microsoft platform.”

Consumer devices also includes patent licenses for consumer devices. MSFT makes money on every Android phone sold because of licenses.
Same for other uses of certain versions of FAT on certain device types.

Perfectly happy about my Lumia 620. Great bang for buck. However, it's not a phone to brag about.

Consumer devices would include the Xbox, right?

Cooking the books.

If you look at the segments report[1] you'll find that the real drivers of the increase was Devices and Consumer Hardware, which was mostly driven by the Xbox launch, and Commercial Licensing.
But the Gross Margin tells a different story. When you subtract the cost of making the Xbox consoles the D&C Hardware segment actually decreased from last year. The only real increase is Commercial Licensing, which is mainly Office and servers.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...

Does the licensing include the "Android Tax" ?

I think so. Here's their description of the segments, http://www.microsoft.com/investor/CompanyInfo/SegmentInfo/Ov...

Patent licensing is in D&C Licensing, not Commercial Licensing.

Nice. I wish they would break this out a bit more:
> Bing search share grew to 18.2% and search > advertising revenue grew 34%.
It echos what we're seeing in terms of more people using alternative search channels (which, on a per page view basis, increases revenue in those channels). But for me the interesting bit is that their revenue grew twice as fast as their market share. That could be because they have moved to a point where incremental share is entirely accretive to their revenue, or it can mean that they are getting more for their ads. That would help understand whether or not Google's CPC is going to go down a little or more than a little :-).

That sentence doesn't read like that to me. Their search market share is 18.2% and is not a growth number. Advertising grew 34% from some unspecified base.

Fair enough, the previous quarter they just said this : "Search advertising revenue grew 47% driven by an increase in revenue per search and volume."
Google's CPC in their third quarter 2013 was down 4%. If the ratio holds then a 34% increase in revenue would translate into a 2.9% decrease in CPC. Of course that assumes they are trading traffic 1:1. Hence my curiosity. Google will announce in a couple of weeks and we'll get to see.

And from Google "CPC ... decreased approximately 2% over the third quarter of 2013."

A friend who used Bing advertising told me he got much better results per dollar compared to Adwords. Better conversion and lower costs. Regrettably, Bing has very low volume outside the US. On our company site, Bing referrals are less than 2% of Google.

It seems Microsoft (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics) is doing financially better than Google (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG+Key+Statistics) in every aspect. Microsoft also has a more diversified business so I wonder why Google still has a larger market cap.

For once and for all, markets value companies based on future growth prospects rather than current results. Markets are betting that Google has a better growth prospect vs. Microsoft - which I do not doubt. Similarly is the reason why Twitter is valued at $30B with less than a billion dollar in annual revenue - there is a reason for that and the reason is future growth. You can argue that Twitter or Google may not grow as fast/much as what market is predicting - but that valuation is based on future earnings and NOT present earnings. So you comparing the current balance sheets/income statement to determine market caps is a futile exercise.

The market works in mysterious ways. I feel the same when comparing Apple to MS. MS is more diversified. If Apple royally screws up the iPad, they can do a lot of harm to their business. If MS screws up Windows (and they have, a few times), they have so many other revenue streams that they can survive.

It's not as much other revenue streams than the steady business of corporate IT. When Microsoft released Vista, companies continued to deploy (and pay for) XP. When 8 didn't get the stellar reception Microsoft expected, enterprises kept on deploying Windows 7. The same goes for every version of Office, with the added "benefit" (for Microsoft) that documents created by version n are usually not compatible with version n-1, thus forcing full user base upgrades of Office (or holding Office upgrades back when it can't run on the official corporate Windows). The same also happens with servers: if your company has a dozen critical apps developed in ASP.Net, it's very likely that, when a server upgrade is due, it will be a Windows server.

Not necessarily. There's a free compatibility pack that lets you open new docx etc documents in much older versions of Office, and in some cases, edit them. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3
This support goes back to Windows 2000 SP4 and Office 2000, which is ancient in software terms.
There are also free viewers if you don't have a copy of Office.
In any case, Office supports dozens of file formats so you're not obliged to use the latest. You can create files in old Microsoft formats and some non-Microsoft formats.

> open new docx etc documents in much older versions of Office, and in some cases, edit them
Well... There is partial functionality. That makes it even more difficult to support the stack as you have to keep track of which versions of what can edit which documents.
> You can create files in old Microsoft formats
Try explaining that to the average Office user.

What's the average cost per year of employing an average Office worker? $50.000?
What's the cost per year of buying a copy of Office? (I'm still on Office 2007 and it's 2014...)
People whose time is worth so little that they can't afford to update Office can spend time on workarounds instead.

That only recently changed. Pretty sure Google had a lower market cap for many years, like 2008-2011, when the stock price was around $500. (If someone can figure out how to graph the market caps that would be nice)
The market is evaluating future potential. When Google's stock price was around $500, the P/E was pretty darn low, so people didn't think Google had much future potential.
Now due to some forays into new businesses like cell phones and hardware, and PR about stuff like Glass and self-driving cars, the market thinks Google has potential again.
Likewise Apple's P/E dropped below 10 last year, so the market obviously thought they had very little growth potential.

expectations for the future is the difference. the stock market weights future earnings and dividends.

The Beta on MSFT is 0.7

MSFT has been flat for so long that no one wants to buy it.

>MSFT has been flat for so long that no one wants to buy it.
What? You call this flat? [1] The dividend payout has gone up, the price has been rising. If you call that a flat and that there is no interest in it, then I am sorry for the following remark: You have no idea about stocks and stock markets!
[1]http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&c...

Let me rephrase. They aren't a growth stock anymore, so no one who wants growth stocks wants to buy it. Very recently, they have made some gains, but a lot of people remember the previous 10 years.

Microsoft has been doing fantastic over the past 5 years, especially when you take into account dividends. Just cause they were massively overvalued during the dot com bubble does not mean it has been a flat stock.
I really don't understand how you can dismiss market data that's right in front of you, it's bordering on denial.

He is right. For years market insiders considered MS a flat stock and no one wanted to recommend it. That has changed in the past 6 months and all of the sudden it has popped up on everyone's buy radar. I always thought the market was crazy especially when MS was at $18 in 2008.

That seems silly, they pay dividends. I'm perfectly happy with flat, dividend-paying stocks.

What seems silly? 3% annually in dividents is below inflation level.

Fed's target rate is 2%, and either way it's close. Also, you can be quite confident you will get that 3% return if the stock is flat. Much more than you can say for a 0.07%-return savings account.
You wouldn't want to put all your money into a 3% dividend stock, but as part of a larger diversification? Solid choice IMO.

Up 14% from $21.5B from a year earlier, which was also a record:
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...
Key difference probably being Xbox launch.

So what's it? Xbox division is a loss leader and should be dumped or a revenue source? HN can't make its mind :)

Loss leaders are sources of revenue, but not sources of profit.

I think the problem is that you seem to assume that HN has one mind.

Azure is pretty good VPS, Skydrive is usable for anyone deep in the MS ecosystem, they still sell their VS, Office, and Outlook pretty much at market saturation.
And they make more money per Android phone than Google. And more money per Android phone than per Windows phone.

People should focus on profits, not revenue.

Holiday season, Xbox One launch - it's much easier to make "revenue" off $500 hardware, than from $5 a month Office services. 4 million Xbox Ones is already an extra $2 billion in revenue, regardless of what the profit is.
I expect their revenue to continue to increase a little bit in the next quarters (YoY), as they keep focusing on selling hardware. I don't think their profits will improve too much, and might even see a decline within a few quarters, as it gets harder and harder to sell Windows 8 licenses, since most people don't like it too much, enterprise customers don't like it, and they've just announced a year and a half before release that Windows 9 is coming next year, which is pretty crazy on their part. Android and iOS will also keep affecting the sales of PCs, and therefore the sales of Windows licenses, too.

They didn't announce Windows 9. Those were tech sites just reporting on rumours. And considering that the last couple OSes have been released on 3 year cycles, mid-2015 is exactly when you would expect Windows 9 to come out.

> 3.9 million Xbox One consoles and 3.5 million Xbox 360 consoles.
Is anyone else surprised by the sales numbers for the Xbox 360?

They sold them "into the retail channel", which I think means retailers bought them. Microsoft probably tried to liquidate the rest of their Xbox 360 stock in light of the Xbox One, which could explain the large number.

Xbox 360 is supposed to continue alongside the Xbox One. It sold well in the US in the holiday season, according to NPD, and I'd assume it still appeals in many parts of the world where the Xbox One is just too expensive.
Lack of compatibility is an obvious drawback but consoles usually are incompatible.

Even though I'm not really a gamer, for some time I was considering getting it for GTA V. In the end I didn't but I wouldn't be surprised if some people had done that.

I did just that. Although I bought a pre-owned console.

There are very few titles for Xbox One still, especially for Kinect. More importantly, all Xbox 360 games can now be found for very deep discounts, opening up a whole new category of customers who were previously priced out (EDIT: and game sales drive system sales)

They actually released a new version of the 360 recently. Presumably it's cheaper to manufacture than the previous one, and it signals that they intend to sell both for at least some time yet.

I think the 360 is going to be like the ps2 was last generation. An obsolete console with a surprising number of sales.

Given the huge (and growing) game library on the 360 that doesn't work on the Xbox One, it's hardly obsolete. I have two friends who just bought their first 360 in the last few months. They bought it over the One because (1) WAY more games (2) less expensive games, and (3) all our friends have one so lots of friends to play online with.

To echo this point, there are many people who take the PS2 approach of buying a console at the end of its lifecycle to take advantage of buying all used games or old games and rock bottom prices.

This is what I'm doing with the PS3. Looking to buy one right now so I can finally play (and own) all the PS3 exclusives that will only be available on PS4 via their subscription streaming service.

The PS2 continued to sell very well after the PS3 arrived as well.

GTA 5

Like it or not, their services are pervasive in the enterprise. Office 365 is the future for so many Fortune 500 companies and Sharepoint 2013 is a huge push too.
As much as I wish there was more Unix/Linux at my company, all eggs are in the MS basket for sure.

That pervasiveness seems like a double-edged sword. First, what if Microsoft really does lose it in a big way (rather than just remaining stuff, boring and unimaginative)? Enterprises will really be on the hook to find replacements, and to create portable versions of all that documentation that's in .doc and .docx format. Second, does "the enterprise" and "the rest of the world" divergence have any consequences? The Sharepoint thing is a good example. Everybody else uses Apache, nginx or something, but corporations use Sharepoint because it lets them keep a thumb on their employees. Won't any innovation made by The Rest of the World just pass them by? Will Sharepoint admins end up making the big bucks because there's no easy to find, off-the-street source of those folks?

Nice EPS @ $0.78 as well.

Yup the street had them at $0.67 http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/earnings-forecast
Why did they release this after hours?

> Why did they release this after hours? All earnings/major news releases are pre/after hours in order to reduce volatility on the news. Look at pre/after hours spikes of anyone (including MSFT) releasing earnings to see the effect earnings have on stock. Netflix yesterday was also a good example.

people always release earnings after hours.

Am I being overly cynical in 1) they bought nokia, 2) revenue != profit, 3) nokia sells a lot of cheap phones.

Yes, because the purchase hasn't closed yet, so those revenues aren't included. Also, there was near-record profit to go along with the revenue, so margins aren't down too badly.

What is Windows OEM Pro revenue?

OEM is their one time install version of windows (with switches). This is the license usually carried by most hardware retailers.

My guess is its Lenovo's OEM business. Lenovo supplies a lot of Fortune 100 companies with laptops and they run Win7 Pro.

A clever way of not differentiating Windows 7 and Windows 8 revenue.

I'm a new investor who's learning about technology stocks. Will someone with a better understanding of the market explain what this news means to prospective investors?

That's not really HN's forte. You may have better luck over at the Motley Fool (http://www.fool.com/)

Thanks for the resource!

Microsoft is still milking slow to change enterprises. That is the main story here.

Now they can afford to buy some new tech. Cheaper than innovating weak product.

I wish they'd buy:
* Xamarin and polish the debugging, VS integration and Mono in general (maybe replace a lot of it with MS' .NET implementation? I can dream)
* MvvmCross and polish it and put it into the .NET BCL
* JetBrains (or just ReSharper) and give it a once over (performance- and code analysis-wise) and ship it with VS.
* Maybe Digia for Qt to replace MFC (this one's kind of selfish since Qt is used in places Microsoft probably doesn't care for - maybe they could sponsor the Windows side).
> Cheaper than innovating weak product.
Aside from MFC I think Microsoft has fairly solid solutions to a lot of problems (Azure, Active Directory, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Office, .NET).

Agreed. I wish they would would buy Xamarin and make it easy to build C# MVC applications and deploy on Linux/BSD. Give me that with entity framework to MySQL/Postgresql and I am sold. Will convert over to using it for everything. Add in ReSharper and it has the potential to be the most productive environment on any platform.

Can't sell windows server licenses if you let people run on Linux.
Xamarins price is way too high and I bet apple would block the apps built with it if msft bought them (and they'd likely sue for reverse engineering).

> apple would block the apps built with it
Apple went there [1] and failed [2].
[1] http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controver...

MSFT has been in the position of buying pretty much anyone for a long time. I don't see how "now" fits here.

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