Microsoft's Cloud Bet Continues To Pay Off In Latest Earnings (theverge.com) 63
In its 2018 financial results, Microsoft reported revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion. "Revenue has jumped 12 percent year-over-year during the holiday quarter, and the trend of Microsoft's success with the cloud has continued," reports The Verge. "This time around, Azure revenue has increased by a massive 98 percent." From the report: Overall server and cloud services revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year, alongside the massive 98 percent jump in Azure revenue. It's clear Microsoft's future growth and revenue opportunities are with the cloud, so it's no surprise to see the company continually investing there to be competitive with Amazon. Microsoft's Office 365 subscription bet for consumers is also paying off. 29.2 million people are now using Office 365 on the consumer side, with revenue increasing 12 percent year-over-year for Office consumer and cloud. On the commercial side, Office revenue is also up at a 10 percent increase since the same period last year.
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Azure is fine, but... (Score:2)
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How does one pronounce "azure"? I've heard AHZ-uhr, ey-ZUHR, Escher, as-YURE and a few others...
You pronounce it like the French Riviera, The Côte d'Azur
(French pronunciation: [kot dazy]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Might require some wine before attempting.
Recommend eating cheese just to be safe.
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How does one pronounce "azure"?
Presumably it's pronounced like the color [wikipedia.org]
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Apple also paid a one time $38 billion tax bill to bring overseas money back into the country. Where it will employ people and generate profits that are taxed
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
It's almost like reducing corporate tax rates increases economic activity and future tax revenues or something.
Re:Net income? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Net income? (Score:4, Informative)
They paid the $38 billion so they could bring offshore money back to the US where they intend to create 20,000 jobs. They'll spend $30 billion over five years doing it
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
Apple Inc. said it will bring hundreds of billions of overseas dollars back to the U.S., pay about $38 billion in taxes on the money and spend tens of billions on domestic jobs, manufacturing and data centers in the coming years.
The iPhone maker plans capital expenditures of $30 billion in the U.S. over five years and will create 20,000 new jobs at existing sites and a new campus it intends to open. The Cupertino, California-based company's shares rose 1.7 percent to a record closing price of $179.10.
and if you look further down the total expenditure is much larger - around $200 billion
Apple has the largest offshore cash reserves of any U.S. company, with about $252 billion at the end of September, the most recently reported fiscal quarter. The tax rate indicates that Apple is likely bringing back a majority of its overseas cash back to the U.S., leaving only a small portion for international investments like retail stores.
"They're going to have well over $200 billion by the end of this year that will be available for incremental investments, capital returns and M&A," said Matthew Kanterman, a New York-based Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. The new tax law lets U.S. companies bring overseas cash reserves back home in one year and pay the resulting tax bill over eight years. "And Apple hasn't historically done big M&A," he said.
Five-Year Spending Plan
The $30 billion in capital expenditures will come as part of $350 billion that Apple expects to spend in the U.S. over the next five years. The 20,000 new jobs include additional Apple employees at its campuses, data centers, and retail stores, but not third-party developers for iPhone and Mac apps, an economy Apple has touted in the past.
Apple said that part of the $30 billion in capital expenditures will go toward a new U.S.-based campus, new data centers and additional supplier investments. The company, which opened a new headquarters in Cupertino last year, said its new U.S. site initially will be focused on employees who provide technical support to Apple product users. The new location, which Apple said it will announce later this year, will be similar to the company's existing campus in Austin, Texas, for supply-chain and technical-support employees.
Can This Tax Proposal Lure Companies and Cash Home?: QuickTake
Apple said it will increase its local manufacturing fund, announced last year, from $1 billion to $5 billion, indicating that it will be sourcing more components for its products domestically. As part of the original fund, Apple invested in Corning Inc. and Finisar Corp., companies that make components for iPhone glass screens and lasers for Face ID and AirPods, respectively.
Now as I have often pointed out Apple is not a charity but a fairly ruthless profit making entity that would slaughter its users and sell their organs if it could do so without causing expensive class action lawsuits that would make such a course of action unprofitable. It is therefore reasonable to think the Apple board expect to make substantially more than the $38 billion it lost in taxes by moving money on shore.
If Apple wanted to leave the money dormant it could leave it offshore. They're obviously bringing the money back to the US because they think they can sweat it more there as the Bloomberg article explains.
With clouds it rains (Score:1, Interesting)
The future is Windows 10S and Edge (no other browsers allowed) connected clouds at Microsoft, with secure boot and end of support locking out Windows 7 and Linux. You will pay for this future and like it.
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You can put Linux on Azure, either choose from one of the prebuilt OS images or bring your own. Also, it is considerably cheaper to do so, as you aren't paying for Windows by the hour if you do. If you bring your own, make sure you use Microsoft's open source cloud drivers on your OS, as your performance will suck without them.
If you want to use Windows on the cloud, you can use AWS, Google, IBM, etc... the price difference between Windows and Linux on those clouds is roughly the same.
The primary reason Mic
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And yet their cloud business still isn't bigger than AWS, and they still have less servers on the Internet than Linux, and secure boot still allows you to install Linux with the one-time "hassle" of disabling it (was all of three mouse clicks on a brand new Dell laptop, and you won't find a friendlier OEM to Microsoft than Dell) with no end to that policy in sight.
Nice FUD though. I'm sure disabling Secure Boot on anything but Microsoft hardware will happen Real Soon Now (tm) and all the doom-and-gloom pro
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perhaps use some more modern numbers rather than making garbage guesses to come to garbage conclusions. MS are still a long way behind but they are chipping away at the lead.
https://winbuzzer.com/2018/01/16/report-microsoft-azure-took-4-market-share-aws-last-quarter-xcxwbn/
Who is using it and what for? (Score:2)
I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems. We had a guy go whole hog into training and there was little customer interest, which doesn't help his (or anyone else's) training since it's a fairly dynamic offering which seems to evolve quickly.
I have been unimpressed with Office 365. The online tools are missing basic features present in the on-premise version. And the costs are high, once you pass about 40 users on premise is actually cheaper,
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If by 'big public sector client' you mean the NHS then thank heavens they're not still using Windows XP
https://www.theinquirer.net/in... [theinquirer.net]
90 PER CENT of the NHS continues to run Windows XP machines, two and a half years after Microsoft ditched support for the ageing OS.
It's Citrix who is ringing the alarm bells, having learnt that 90 per cent of NHS Trusts are still running Windows XP PCs. The firm sent Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to 63 NHS Trusts, 42 of which responded.
The data also revealed that 24 Trusts are still not sure when they'll migrate from Windows XP to a newer version of Microsoft's OS. 14 per cent said they would be transitioning to a new operating system by the end of this year, while 29 per cent pledged to make the move sometime next year.
That article was from 08 December 2016. WannaCry hit May 2017 and caused chaos on unpatched systems. XP hadn't been updated since 2014
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/... [nao.org.uk]
The Department was warned about the risks of cyber attacks on the NHS a year before WannaCry and although it had work underway it did not formally respond with a written report until July 2017. The Department and Cabinet Office wrote to trusts in 2014, saying it was essential they had "robust plans" to migrate away from old software, such as Windows XP by April 2015. In March and April 2017, NHS Digital had issued critical alerts warning organisations to patch their systems to prevent WannaCry. However, before 12 May 2017, the Department had no formal mechanism for assessing whether local NHS organisations had complied with their advice and guidance and whether they were prepared for a cyber attack.
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When I checked a few months ago, Azure was more expensive than AWS for compute but cheaper for storage. Since my use case was storage (offsite backup of my photos), I went with Azure.
Re:Who is using it and what for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you including email? An on-prem Exchange setup with decent storage allowances, redundancy and staff doesn't come cheap. Exchange in O365 has fairly generous email storage limits and doesn't require anything like as much technical expertise to run.
It may be possible to do it for less on-prem, but good Exchange admins are hard to come by and penny pinching by management often leads to systems with tiny mailboxes so that you end up having the nightmare of local PST files if you want to keep old email.
I have no doubt it can be done right on-prem, but in practice it rarely is. Certainly as a user in a corporate environment, O365 has been a breath of fresh air.
For businesses though, the main argument seems to be the O365 is operational cost, on-prem requires capital expenditure.
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In my old IT gig the biggest benefit of O365 was that we stayed on the current version all the time. I didn't have to go convince someone to let us upgrade to a new version of Office or a new version of Exchange, it just happened.
I do consulting now, and I have customers that are still using (and paying for support on!) Office 2010 and Exchange 2013
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Do you work for M$?.
I've run on premises exchange for 20 years for 50 staff and I've spent about 2 days a year managing it and I'm an electrical engineer, not an IT guy.
We also run 18vms on a single Dell R720. This would be dear as poison to do on Azure.
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I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems.
I wouldn't call it "interest".
Microsoft has announced that Exchange 2016 will be the final version released as software, with the only upgrade path being Exchange 365 as a service.
So while Exch 2016 is still under support, once it hits EOL you can't just buy the newest version to upgrade to, you must migrate to their cloud services.
This leaves companies with two main options.
A) Begin work on migrating away from Exchange completely, or
B) Begin work on migrating into their cloud services.
C) is to just remain
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I have read that 2016 is not the last on-premise version. The next on premise version is in progress and MS has said they have no plans (now, anyway) to eliminate on premise.
I think O365 is too expensive for large clients (at a fairly low scale you could start throwing away hardware and software annually running on premise and still be cheaper) and there are too many data security and compliance requirements that would make companies refuse to go to O365.
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I think O365 is too expensive for large clients
Note that very large clients don't pay anything like the list price per customer. This has always been the case with Microsoft products, offering big discounts on site licenses for large companies.
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In my opinion, the "complexity" of Exchange management for basic installs (single server, no DAG, under 500 users) is greatly overstated. It's gotten somewhat more bothersome to manage with the decline in quality since 2013, frequent CUs and the degrading of the GUI by switching to web only. But overall, it doesn't require a ton of management involvement. Maybe 2-4 hours a week of monitoring at best.
The problem with storage costs, etc, is that storage is relatively cheap and with virtualization there's
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The cloud is a way to force customers into a subscription model for software. A subscription model is really needed for software but customers have been very resistant to going that way. Purchasing software without maintenance is not tenable in the long term because it means vendors have to concentrate on adding new features to encourage upgrades to maintain their cash flow. This causes bloat and adds bugs and makes for many different versions of a product which then all need maintenance. Customers woul
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or you sell the software and separately sell a support subscription, which is hugely common in corp environments, but again the SMB and individual users would likely balk at this pretty badly, or not pay for the support and then cry when they are compromised by a vuln.
Consumer Friendly Policies = More Profit (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm a security guy, so I see the world from the perspective as risk. Have you tried using LibreOffice? I'm no MS shill (one laptop of mine runs macOS and the other Debian). LibreOffice is so far behind MS Office. I don't disagree that it's a risk to use cloud services, but it's a risk to waste a bunch of extra time working with documents because you moved from MS Office to LibreOffice. I would make damn sure that you have a real risk you can articulate before you switch to a less productive tool chain. Libr
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Nobody at Microsoft cares what you decide to do, they care what businesses decide to do. I'm in the field everyday with small - medium businesses. 95% of them would be better off in the cloud, bar-none. And that includes security. People dont update (it costs money), they dont upgrade (it costs money), they rarely do more than just the extreme bare minimum to keep their networks running. And there are thousands of them, and Microsoft knows this.
That's why they push the cloud. They want their products under
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Perhaps MS should get a new CEO who isn't cloud-crazy.
"Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $7.8 billion and increased 15%"
"Server products and cloud services revenue increased 18% driven by Azure revenue growth of 98%"
I think you picked the wrong article for your advice to Microsoft...
Well Done Walmart! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, Wal-Mart has its own cloud service, too.