Microsoft Cloud Strength and Hardware Progress Drive Record Q1 Revenue
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The reason for this is MS are on the backfoot, but instead of playing defensively they've gone all out to hit every selling point their competition have, and then add their own stuff too, while leveraging what is quite a lot of existing small and medium business lockin to migrate over to the cloud as appropriate. Many people (myself included) thought Amazon, Rackspace etc. would prevent this from working, but they've done it really well.
I've also seen a lot of companies move to Office 365, when previously they'd have gone with Google Docs. They seem to have prevented that threat from getting much further too.
The latest management portal though? I'm not so sure about that...
Silverlight failed because the market for flash-style browser plugins was drying up and moving to JavaScript.
Search advertising revenue up 23%, due to higher revenue per search and search volume.
Bing U.S. market share at 19.4%, up 140 basis points over prior year
How many SP3's is that?
It's actually quite lovely. Windows RT is much better than I had assumed -- I've used x86 Windows 8 tablets before, but Internet talk had given me the impression that the ARM version is pretty bad. In reality it's fast and fluid on the Lumia hardware. Word runs great (and yes, I like using desktop Word on a 10" touch screen).
It's a bit of a shame that the Lumia 2520 will probably be the last Windows RT device ever. Nobody but Microsoft is making them any more, and they're clearly seeing more success from the x86-based Surface Pro line.
$1000 x 1000 = $1M 900 x 1000 = 900,000 units moved
Since I'm going to guess they include SP3 accessories in this and that can increase average cost something like 20%, let's drop that sales number down a load and say 500k-700k, likely closer to 700k.
Apple moved >12M iPads last quarter for context.
I really like my SP3 as a main daily machine and think many people will slide into usage of such a device if they start acclimating to cloud storage and/or more enterprise orgs start doing private cloud.
If MS can ride the "private" cloud story into the enterprises where they already have servers, etc. they could provide the better end-to-end story in the next 2-4 years for power tablets that most people from admin staff to executives could use well within the sweet spot of existing infrastructure.
Even if they can't move hardware units, they are already firming up the enterprise software story by going more strongly into multi-platform support for Office, etc.