14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has revealed the financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017, reporting revenue of $20.5 billion and net income of $4.7 billion.
This represents an increase of 5 percent in constant currency, but what’s more interesting is that Windows is no longer the product that’s driving the company forward, but Office and the cloud.
Specifically, the Office commercial products and cloud services revenue improved by 5 percent, with Office 365 posting a growth of no less than 51 percent. Furthermore, Office consumer products and cloud revenue grew by 8 percent, with Office 365 consumer subscribers now totaling 24 million.
The Intelligent Cloud business grew 7 percent, with Azure posting an increase of no less than 116 percent, as Azure compute usage more than doubled year-over-year.
Windows performance
As far as Windows is concerned, OEM revenue was flat, and so was Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue. Phone revenue declined 72 percent, while gaming revenue dropped 5 percent.
“We now have more than 400 million monthly active devices on Windows 10 and nearly 200,000,000,000 hours of usage. And we are expanding our growth opportunities for Windows with enterprises and an area such as gaming,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
“The number of developers building and updating universal Windows apps is up three times year-over-year, more than 1000 application of been developed using the Cortana API and Windows 10 Cortana search box now has 141 million monthly active users with almost 13,000,000,000 questions asked to date.”
Microsoft, however, expects Windows revenue to go up in the next quarter, as more enterprises are projected to complete the piloting stage and advance to the actual deployment phase of the new OS. The majority of companies waited for the Anniversary Update to launch before deploying Windows 10 on their PCs, and now that this version is finally available, many are evaluating the OS in their own networks.
As a result, Windows should experience growth in the enterprise market, while in the consumer business figures are very likely to remain the same, as the majority of users have already upgraded to the new OS during the free upgrade promo that ended on July 29.
