Yesterday Microsoft announced their second quarter earnings and thanks to the success of Kinect, Xbox, Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010 they reported record earnings and dividends.
The Entertainment and Devices Division showed a 55% growth in revenue. This is the division responsible for Xbox and the wildly popular Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 which has sold 8 million devices since it was released the first week of November 2010. Of course you can also add into that revenue all the Xbox Live subscriptions, Xbox games and downloadable content that is constantly on the move in the Xbox 360 world. I guess it helps to also have 30 million Xbox Live users worldwide these days.
In the desktop arena, Microsoft has now sold 300 million licenses for Windows 7 which continues to cement its place as the best selling Windows OS ever. According to reports 20% of Internet connected PC’s are running Windows 7.
On the business side Office 2010 is the fastest selling version of Office in the companies history and is already 50% beyond Office 2007’s sales over the same time frame.
Some other info highlighted in the earnings reports include:
• Windows Phone 7 launched during the quarter in 30 countries and on 60 operators and nine different devices. Microsoft announced developers are adding Windows Phone 7 applications to the marketplace at a rate of over 100 per day.
• Bing completed the integration of Yahoo! search in the U.S. and Canada and continues to gain share.
• Windows Azure developer momentum continued this quarter, with Pixar Animation Studios, ADP with NVoicePay and others demonstrating compelling uses of the platform.
• Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s fastest downloaded beta browser of all time with over 20 million downloads to date.
• At International CES 2011 in early January, Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will support System on a Chip architectures.
Say what you want – they are providing services, software and devices that people are buying and ultimately in the world of business that is the bottom line.
