Seven more days have passed, and Microsoft’s been busy during them. FY19 Q2 results, Skip Ahead, a bunch of game additions, and a whole lot more can be found in the handy roundup below.
It’s a been a pretty interesting seven days for the Redmond giant, as it revealed the earnings report for Q4 of calendar 2018, opened up – and then promptly closed – enrollment into the Skip Ahead ring, while also adding some nice titles to the Backward Compatibility list. Find all that, and the usual little bit extra below, in your Microsoft digest for the week of January 26 – February 1.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the results of Q2 for its financial year 2019 (fourth quarter of calendar 2018). The Redmond giant posted an operating income of $10.3B and net income of $8.4B on revenues of $32.5 billion, an increase of 18%, 14%, and 12% year-over-year, respectively.
As usual, there are three main categories to watch out for, Productivity and Business Processes ($10.1B revenue, 13% growth YoY), Intelligent Cloud ($9.4B revenue, 20% growth), and More Personal Computing ($13B, 7% growth).
The increase in revenues for the first category was mainly due to Office 365 and LinkedIn, with Office commercial products and services growing 11%. That’s on the back of the products themselves declining by 21%, but commercial services seeing a 34% upswing. Furthermore, Office 365 Commercial seats saw a 27% increase.
On the consumer side, there was a meager 1% increase in Office products and services, something which Microsoft attributes to a “weaker than expected PC market” and the normalization of channel inventories. The good news is that though modest, the number of Office 365 Consumer subscribers grew to 33.3 million – 800,000 more than last quarter.
LinkedIn itself saw a revenue growth of 29%, with cloud sessions increasing by 30%. Dynamics products and services were up 17%, and Dynamics 365 had a 51% upswing.
Moving on to Intelligent Cloud, the category overall saw a 20% increase. It’s perhaps no surprise that Azure once again grew by an impressive 76% year-over-year. Server products and cloud services were up 24%, with server offerings in particular jumping up 3% and enterprise services seeing a 6% increase.
Finally, More Personal Computing saw a Windows OEM revenue decline of 5% — Pro was down 5%, while non-Pro was down 11%. To somewhat balance that out, Windows Commercial products and cloud services were up 14%.
On the back of the Surface Pro 6, Laptop 2, and Studio 2, the Surface division grew by an impressive 39% last quarter.
Gaming, an increasingly important part of the company, grew by 8%. Xbox software and services was up 31%, with hardware revenue declining by 19%. The latter isn’t much of a surprise, as the most powerful console of the lineup – the One X – arrived that same quarter, but in 2017. In terms of Xbox Live monthly users, that bracket grew by 8% to a total of 64 million – including mobile and PC users.
