Microsoft in the Clouds, Thanks to the Cloud

Microsoft reports good quarterly results in almost every domain where it is active. But especially the cloud turnover makes the weather beautiful.

Overall, for the quarter ended March, Microsoft posted revenue of $49.4 billion (18 percent year-over-year) and net of $16.7 billion (8 percent increase).

If we look at the different segments of the company, things are going well everywhere. Still, Microsoft itself emphasizes that its cloud revenues are doing very well, with cloud revenues up 32 percent, to USD 23.4 billion. That is not so much a separate department because Microsoft has cloud activities in different segments.

The business and productivity solutions business (Office, LinkedIn, Dynamics) generated $15.8 billion in revenue, an annual growth rate of 17 percent. In addition, LinkedIn (34 percent more revenue) and servers and cloud services (+29 percent) performed exceptionally well.

The ‘More Personal Computing’ branch, which includes Windows, Windows OEM, Xbox, Bing, advertising and Surface, achieved revenues of $14.5 billion, an increase of 11 percent. The outliers here are mainly search & news advertising (+23 percent), Surface (+13 percent), and Windows commercial products and cloud services (+14 percent).

Overall, Microsoft seems to have had an excellent quarter in every way, and even the lesser segments were outperforming a year ago. In addition, CEO Satya Nadella says Windows 11 is being adopted in businesses even faster than its predecessors.

Although those figures are relative six months after the release, recently, Lansweeper claimed that only 1.44 percent of the (business) user has switched to Windows 11. That’s not unusual, given that many companies traditionally wait to upgrade. But it does put a caveat on claims about rapid adoption.