As another week comes to an end, we take a look at Microsoft’s Q3 2019 results, a few changes related to the May 2019 Update, and the death of Sets. Be sure to catch up via the handy guide below.
Not only has the end of another week come by, but also the end of a fiscal quarter for the Redmond giant, which means we get to see how the company performed in Q3. Apart from that, there’s the set of cumulative updates for Windows 10, some upcoming Xbox software features, and more. Be sure to find all that, and the usual bit extra, in your Microsoft digest for the week of April 20-26.
For the most part, we’ve seen a constant increase in revenue overall from Microsoft, and that trend has been carried over to Q3 2019 as well, with its 14% improvement.
The headline feature was the aforementioned 14% revenue increase year-over-year, which for the third quarter of 2019 (ending March 31) was $30.6 billion. Operating income also climbed by 25% to $10.3 billion, and net income registered a 19% increase to $8.8 billion.
Microsoft’s three main categories saw improvements too: Productivity and Business Processes had a revenue of $10.2 billion (14% increase YoY), Intelligent Cloud brought in $9.7 billion (22% up YoY), and More Personal Computing brought in $10.7 billion (an 8% increase).
In the first category, the main driver of the increase was LinkedIn with a revenue jump of 27%, followed by sessions growing 24% with “record levels of engagement”. Furthermore, Office Commercial products and cloud services grew by 12% – owing to a 30% increase in revenue from Office 365 Commercial and Office commercial seats growing 27%. Because of the shift to the cloud, Office commercial product revenue dropped 19%.
Office Consumer products and services grew 8% in terms of revenue thanks to recurring subscription revenue, while the number of Office 365 subscribers rose to 34.2 million (0.9 million more than the previous quarter). Dynamics revenue was up 13%, and Dynamics 365 revenue grew by 43%.
In terms of the Intelligent Cloud category, Server Products and Cloud Services grew by 27% as far as revenue was concerned, Azure revenue was up an impressive 73%, while server products saw an increase of 7%, and enterprise services grew by 4%.
The More Personal Computing ‘bucket’, so to speak, is where we find the Windows OEM Pro revenue which increased 15%, with non-Pro revenue declining by 1%. Windows commercial products and cloud services saw an increase of 18%, Surface revenue was up 21% compared to last quarter, and gaming revenue grew by 5%. In this gaming category, Xbox software and services revenue was up 12%, and Xbox Live monthly active users increased by 7% to a total of 63 million. No details were shared in regards to hardware revenue.
Finally, Search actually grew a decent 12%, and that is excluding traffic acquisition costs.
Patch Tuesday may have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean cumulative updates won’t be showing up. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened this week, as every single variant of Windows 10 – apart from 1511 and 1809 – got a patch, so there’s a lot to unpack. If you’re on Microsoft’s latest OS endeavor, here’s what you need to be on the lookout for:
Since we touched on the subject of updates, a bit of news concerning the upcoming May 2019 Update has come out, starting with the updated CPU requirements. While there hasn’t been any change in terms of supported chips, the absence of Ryzen 3000 series and the Snapdragon 8cx is noteworthy.
