Microsoft's Q4 Earnings and 2020 Expectations Are Through the Roof (windowsreport.com) 130
Slashdot reader John Nautu shares a report from Windows Report: Microsoft released their Q4 earnings and it's (almost) all good news. The giant registered amazing growth on all departments, increasing its share price by one third. It was a record fiscal year for Microsoft, and the numbers exceeded all expectations:
- Revenue was $33.7 billion and increased 12%
- Operating income was $12.4 billion and increased 20%
- Net income was $13.2 billion GAAP and $10.6 billion non-GAAP, and increased 49% and 21%, respectively
- Diluted earnings per share was $1.71 GAAP and $1.37 non-GAAP, and increased 50% and 21%, respectively
- GAAP results include a $2.6 billion net income tax benefit explained in the Non-GAAP Definition section below
Of course, Microsoft's partnership with many industry leading companies also played a role in the constant development and improvement of their products. Despite Azure leading the way, Office 365, Windows, and Microsoft Teams also contributed to the growth. [Teams recently overtook Slack with 13 million daily users.] It's not all good news though. The Verge notes that the company's gaming business has stalled. "Gaming revenue declined by 10 percent this quarter, alongside Xbox software and services revenue decline of 3 percent."
Ryan Duguid, Chief Evangelist at Nintex, said the company is planning some big things for next year: "In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software)." In after-hours trading, Microsoft shares gained more than 1%. "The closing price gave Microsoft a market capitalization of $1.045 trillion, the only U.S. company worth more than $1 trillion," reports MarketWatch.
- Revenue was $33.7 billion and increased 12%
- Operating income was $12.4 billion and increased 20%
- Net income was $13.2 billion GAAP and $10.6 billion non-GAAP, and increased 49% and 21%, respectively
- Diluted earnings per share was $1.71 GAAP and $1.37 non-GAAP, and increased 50% and 21%, respectively
- GAAP results include a $2.6 billion net income tax benefit explained in the Non-GAAP Definition section below
Of course, Microsoft's partnership with many industry leading companies also played a role in the constant development and improvement of their products. Despite Azure leading the way, Office 365, Windows, and Microsoft Teams also contributed to the growth. [Teams recently overtook Slack with 13 million daily users.] It's not all good news though. The Verge notes that the company's gaming business has stalled. "Gaming revenue declined by 10 percent this quarter, alongside Xbox software and services revenue decline of 3 percent."
Ryan Duguid, Chief Evangelist at Nintex, said the company is planning some big things for next year: "In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software)." In after-hours trading, Microsoft shares gained more than 1%. "The closing price gave Microsoft a market capitalization of $1.045 trillion, the only U.S. company worth more than $1 trillion," reports MarketWatch.
Even more money (Score:1, Troll)
Imagine how much money they could make if they actually made some decent software.
We all know they could do it if they wanted to.
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Haven't you learned? Sucking in IT is job security. If M$ made everything logical, factored, and simple; they'd be too easy to clone by competitors and OSS.
Think of MS-Word. If it were a clean standard, then clones would eat Word's lunch. But to be fully compatible means you have to match Word's bugs, glitches, and oddities. Therefore, clones are only 99% compatible and nobody wants to deal with the confusion of 1% of their do
Re:Even more money (Score:5, Informative)
OpenDocument was going to be that clean, universal standard. Then Microsoft bribed ISO members to approve their own unusable OOXML as well, which took the wind off OpenDocument's sails.
Re:Even more money (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft were never entranched in the server or mobile market, it is much more difficult to displace an entrenched supplier.
Most people don't "prefer" microsoft, to many the microsoft brand is highly toxic by being associated with shoddy products, and this is one of the reasons why they failed so miserably in the mobile market. Most people are not aware that any alternatives to microsoft exist, or they're only aware of apple who they see as an expensive premium product for which they cannot justify the cost. Most end users are not aware that linux or libreoffice exist, or they assume that they must be inferior because they're free.
Same Old Song. (Score:2)
Most people don't "prefer" microsoft, to many the microsoft brand is highly toxic by being associated with shoddy products....Most end users are not aware that linux or libreoffice exist, or they assume that they must be inferior because they're free.
The geek has been peddling these excuses damn near thirty years and by god does it get tiresome.
Microsoft markets MS Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. The geek has LibreOffice, the stand-alone SOHO office suite of the nineties. What he doesn't have is Outlook or any of the other tools and components that make the modern MS system work.
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Microsoft were never entranched in the server or mobile market
Holy crap. How has someone who posts on Slashdot not heard of Exchange or Active Directory. Or are the only "servers" you know of a little NAS box and a LAMP stack?
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I know two people who have tried them. Aside from the to/from-MS-compatibility issues mentioned nearby, they are just used to MS's interface, out of habit. You have to relearn where everything is. One spends hundreds of hours in the office etc. learning one's way around MS-Office and Windows because one has to. Few want to go through that again with a different product.
It's not knock
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No they failed because they tried to displace the incumbents (Apple and Google) with a me-too product. Which is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Meego failed and the same reason Ubuntu Phone failed.
No, they didn't...
Windows mobile predates both ios and android by several years, buyers largely ignored it. iOS came along and offered something compelling. Android was the "me too" product which came along later, but has still managed to capture significant share.
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I have, and I know others who have.
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Well that's the whole point...
Most of their customers are locked in, and will buy wether the software is any good or not. If they invested significantly in improvements, then profit would actually be reduced as there is very little scope for them to gain marketshare.
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Office subscriptions? (Score:2)
Re:Office subscriptions? (Score:5, Insightful)
I take it that you never had to manage an Exchange server then? When the boss's mailbox hits 20 GB, on prem thats an "oh shit" in O365 it's no problem boss. Plus managing an Exchnage farm sucks. MS is offering to do it at a fraction of the cost. There are other reasons too but from the IT Pro side it's I'll pay you to make this headache go away.
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And introduce new headaches when someone else on the subnet starts spamming and suddenly you can't email people. The other issue is that you lose the ability to control the antispam side of things. Need an exception for an important partner that happens to have a bad email setup or happens to be on some blacklist? Nothing you can do about it. Those emails are just gone.
My job 2 years ago involved maintaining a mail server (thankfully not exchange) and much of my time was spend making exceptions to the S
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I don't know why, but almost all companies seem to migrate to Office 365 and now paying subscription.
1.) Algorithms on HFT supercomputers determine a companies stock price. The goal of a company IS NEVER TO MAKE MONEY. It is to RAISE THE STOCK PRICE. Wall Street picks the CEO to do accounting tricks and outsource people for short term quarterly gains for all eternity.
When you need to keep the stock price high each quarter there is no room for software upgrades even if it saves money. You want no variation in highs or lows so a constant monthly subscription keeps costs constant for the algorithms
2. Subscrip
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"short term quarterly gains for all eternity"? Isn't that literally long-term?
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Why is this a trillion dollar company? (Score:3)
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There's going to be fuzzy estimates and uncertainty in all of that valuation, but if there were a magical company where their net profit allowed you to cover the purchase cost of the company after only two years, everyone would start buying that company as quickly as th
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Or - @ $1T cap, a 4% ROI. That seems a little low for an investment, but I'm no expert.
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Re: Why is this a trillion dollar company? (Score:2)
Gaming revenue has stalled... (Score:2)
Well, yeah, not too surprising. We're nearing the end of the Xbox One life cycle, and they've announced their next gen console. So, it seems like a slight drop-off would be expected.
Let's see if they avoid screwing up quite so badly with the launch of their next console like they did with the Xbox One (worthless Kinect accessory, always-connected DRM fiasco, terrible product messaging, dismissive execs, etc).
Don't get carried away (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't get carried away by the hype. Through the roof doesn't describe MSFT's earnings so much as its share price. P/E of 30, historically astronomical by the standards of mature corporations. In simple terms, if you by these shares you don't have any realistic expectation of having them pay for themselves in dividends. Instead you hope that somebody will buy them from you later at an even higher price, and they will buy for one reason alone: they hope that somebody will in turn buy from them at an even higher price. The technical term is bagholder. When stocks of mature corporations get like this, it has always ended in tragedy. Every time. Of course this time will be different, won't it? Won't it?
By all means take a flyer but not with your retirement savings. And keep in mind that the PC market continues to shrink, Microsoft's productivity monopoly along with it.
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Amazon has multiple growing businesses, while Microsoft only has its shrinking PC monopoly and was recently forced to kiss the feet of Tux the Penguin. You know it's true.
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Azure may not have the clout of AWS but it's plenty popular. Their entertainment division is profitable these days. Most people now interact with the internet through tablets, phones, or STBs. Microsoft failed at phones and is not doing all that well with tablets either but it's doing very well with game consoles. They keep trying to ruin their position there with dumb schemes, then backtracking, but luckily for them Sony engages in just as much dumb fuckery, and Nintendo willfully focuses on gimmicks (a co
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Yeah because Android tablets and tablet apps have really taken the world by storm. Puhleaze
Android accounts for over 50% of personal computing devices shipped worldwide. That includes laptops and desktops, virtually none of which run Android. You were saying?
Dow Jones just before the Sub-Prime bubble burst (Score:1)
Don't get carried away by the hype. Through the roof doesn't describe MSFT's earnings so much as its share price. P/E of 30, historically astronomical by the standards of mature corporations.
Year 2008.
Subprime financial crisis.
Dow Jones crashed.
Just before it crashed the Dow Jones index was around 14,000
Today, the same Dow Jones Index is at 27,223, and is going up.
Something is telling me things are going very wrong, very fast !
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I just joined the dark side ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... for the first time in roughly 20 years. The last Windows I personally productively used was Windows 2000. The company I just joined is M$ through and through - I'm the only Linux guy in 25 and the only web developer. Mr. IT I sit and work with is an M$ guy through and through and we get along perfectly. We decided to get me a Windows machine so I wouldn't have to bother with groupware and integration and leave that to him when problems occur.
Here are some of my observatoins so far:
- Windows CLI is as shitty and unwieldy as it was 25 years ago in the DOS age. Powershell is neat and powerful, but it's not the default CLI, you have to install it and it has its totally own way of doing things. Chocolately or whatever its called (think Homebrew for Windows) soothes the pain a little but is no where near the real Linux/macOS/*nix experience.
- M$ owns you and your system. Its well disuised but it shows as soon as you go one or two steps below the surface (pun not intended but welcome and fitting).
- Edge with Bing is neat in that it doesn't give a damn about copyright stuff and you can search and download images with one click. That's because everyone is looking over at Chrome. Neat. :-) I use Edge+Bing for image searching exclusively.
- Integration and usability are surprisingly good. We have MS Teams, OneNote, Outlook and Whatnot (TM) and even though I havent used Outlook in 20 years and never really liked it, work has been done. I even get this "Ribbon" thing M$ has had going on since - I don't know - 15 years ago or something. There even is a macOS Exposé like feature and some tiny bit of defauit window snapping like in Ubuntu. Nice. VSCode is right at home and I use it on Linux too, so no problems here, CLI integration aside.
Conclusion (so far): Windows and M$ have been changing ever since Nadella - no news here - and AFAICT it's been for the better. They're still the dark side, make no mistake - they wan't us dead - but it seems they don't treat their minions like absolute shite anymore like they used to. A more full-stack walled-garden approach like Apple or Google, sort of. Their current hardware strategy reflects that. In short, their products aren't total shite anymore. I presume that reflects in their current revenue.
As a side effect I expect more people to transition into an "all digital" approach simply because their favorite dark side overlords lead them there. That maybe doing some good. And I now have a Windows box. I wouldn't have thought that would happen ever again, but here we are. I won't waste my time learning the details - Linux is my home - but I'm using it and it's even pleasant at times. Surprise.
My 2 eurocents.
Re:I just joined the dark side ... (Score:4)
Conclusion (so far): Windows and M$ have been changing ever since Nadella - no news here - and AFAICT it's been for the better.
Every single time Windows 10 is updating (and consequently interrupting my work) I fucking KNOW it's not been for the better.
You have *no* idea ... (Score:2)
... my very young Padawan. ... We lost a lot of good men back then.
You didn't see Windows 98 or Windows ME.
*That* was bad.
( Obligatory South Park Reference [youtube.com] )
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I actually did see (and extensively use) Windows 98. Also 95 and of course 3.11. Hell, I even had to service a system running Windows 286.
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Every single time Windows 10 is updating (and consequently interrupting my work) I fucking KNOW it's not been for the better.
If Windows updating is interrupting your work then you are doing something very wrong. On my PC windows updates in the background and I get a notification that at some point in the next few days I should plan to reboot.
Frankly I've tried working for 3 days straight but these days I split that up with breaks to take a shit.
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I get an popup once a day that cannot be ignored, it blocks all window access until I click OK. I set the network connection to metered, but this only slows it down. A batch file I use to kill a few processes will fail due to a lack of permissions, but still removes the dialogue box. I just kill musnotinotificationux.exe,musnotification.exe and windowsupdatebox.exe every 20 second
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The upcoming version of Win10 has some improvements to the command line experience. They're putting in a better frontend for command line with a tabbed UI and some basic quality of life features and you can choose which tab launches into which shell (CLI, PS, bash, etc.).
Install the Ubuntu System on it and use bash! (Score:3)
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And it's abysmally slow versus virtualized Linux.
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Windows CLI is as shitty and unwieldy
Windows has a CLI? I think you're Windowsing wrong.
Remember, (Score:2)
$640 billion ought to be enough profits for anyone.
No-market economy (Score:1)
All this, because of escaping market parts in economy, mostly result of manipulations, not good software. It's only a start, btw.
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How is this different than any company? Given a choice among dumping most your resources into marketing, lawyers, or quality; it appears the first two are more profitable in the longer run. Humans 101.
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Also that, why institutional support of market part in the concept of market economy is both necessity and reality. Only its intensity is left for considerations. I would say, in the end of this day, it wasn't sufficient.
OTOH, given how severe control by MS of your business desktop, business mail, business office suite and your business wallet is established, I'd coin new breath into the realistic alternatives to this model of future personal computer. With overpriced options not being very potent neither,
Of course they did (Score:1)
Re: Windows Server overtaking Linux (Score:2)
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Worse, we got Gnome 3 and systemd.
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PHP is aimed at being easy to learn, which subsequently results in lots of code being written by inexperienced developers...
Putting the database and code on the same server is a cost saving exercise more than anything else, there is no reason it has to be that way.
Not sure what risk is exposed by having uncompiled text, the users accessing a website cannot retrieve the uncompiled text unless another unrelated vulnerability lets them do so.
PHP can theoretically be used for multiple purposes, so can C, so can
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I was reading something somewhere just today, now I wish I'd made a note of it. But there was an observation of a phenomenon where in good times people seem to favor the extreme and maybe unpleasant sour types. It gave as an example the 1920s in America, an economic boom time, and that's when the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. Maybe the rancor in public discourse now is related to this prosperity?
(I was reading the Economist in the library, that's probably where I saw it, maybe in one of the book reviews.
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What does that have to do with now? This is not a good time, except for robber barons. Everyone else's real wages are down, pollution has increased over the last two years, the unemployment rate is horse shit, and most Americans are just one medical emergency away from homelessness.
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I was responding to the anonymous coward whose original post may be below your threshold. In his/her universe, this is the best of times. They may have been a troll, but rather than being trolled, I decided to stay in their universe and respond with something that might give them food for thought. I don't really want to make people mad, or get mad myself (though sometimes that happens no matter what.) I don't even necessarily want people to agree with me. I want to make them think.