Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte

Jan 31st 2024

Windows Weekly 866

Squishmallows With Guns

FY24 Q2 earnings, Teams worldwide outage, 1st-run experience redesign

Records live every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 18:00 UTC.
Category: News

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it earned a net income of $21.9 billion on revenues of $62 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2023. Those figures are up 33 percent and 18 percent, respectively, year-over-year (YOY)

Microsoft earnings

  • Analysis of Microsoft’s FY24 Q2
  • You Can’t Spell Activision Without AI

Intelligent Cloud: Azure, AI

  • Microsoft’s biggest business unit delivered $25.9 billion in revenue, up 20 percent YOY and driven primarily by its Azure cloud platform
  • Azure revenues were up 30 percent in the quarter, 6 points of which Microsoft attributed to "AI services"
  • Server and cloud services revenue jumped 22 percent.
  • Enterprise Mobility installed base grew 11 percent to over 268 million seats

Productivity and Business Processes: Microsoft 365

  • $19.2 billion in revenues, with growth of 13 percent YOY
  • Office Commercial revenues were up 15 percent, and Office 365 seats grew 12 percent 
  • Office Consumer grew 5 percent, with the Microsoft 365 consumer offerings growing 16 percent to 78.4 million subscribers

More Personal Computing: Xbox, Windows

  • Revenues of $16.9 billion, up 19 percent YOY
  • Activision Blizzard has changed things: Gaming revenues surged 49 percent (44 points from Activision Blizzard)
  • Activision Blizzard has changed things: Xbox content and services revenues were up 61 percent (55 points from Activision Blizzard)
  • Xbox hardware revenues inched up by 3 percent
  • Windows revenues from PC makers grew 11 percent in the quarter, with Microsoft citing "market volumes stabilizing to pre-pandemic levels" 
  • That stabilization didn't help the Surface business, as Microsoft reported a 9 percent decline in revenues from Devices


Other industry financial reports

  • Google was bigger than Microsoft, with non-advertising businesses seeing growth
  • Intel's struggles continue, but a light at the end of the tunnel
  • AMD is not doing great. The time for AMD to gain on Intel is coming to a close

Windows

  • Canary: Voice Clarity comes to more PCs, and Microsoft previews new/old Windows Setup first-run experience
  • Dev: Minor bug fixes only
  • Beta: Snap Layout suggestions, new settings in Widgets, and you can now revert to stable (!!)
  • Chrome is finally coming to Windows on Arm. A new era?
  • Microsoft Edge 121 adds several new features
  • OneDrive gets a new design on the web

Microsoft 365

  • Teams goes down for the count, making us realize how much we hate Teams

AI

  • Microsoft adds porn deepfake guardrails to Designer AI. So, this wasn’t there before now?
  • FTC is investigating Microsoft/OpenAI and other Big Tech AI partnerships
  • NVIDIA RTX Video HDR can now convert SDR video to HDR

Xbox

  • Microsoft can finally bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to the iPhone (and Fortnite is coming back to the iPhone in the EU)
  • Xbox president joins the chorus of complaints around Apple’s EU DMA non-compliance compliance
  • Xbox Series S screenshots will be restricted to Full HD
  • 1900 layoffs at Activision Blizzard, Zenimax, and Xbox

Tips and Picks

  • Tip of the week: Upgrade to passkeys if you use Google Password Manager and a Pixel device
  • App pick of the week: Insync
  • RunAs Radio this week: Software Licensing in 2024 with Mary Jo Foley
  • Brown liquor pick of the week: Dailuaine 16 Flora & Fauna

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

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