Microsoft’s big Windows 10 push is part of broader strategy

The revenue Microsoft generated from their cloud business, including the Azure platform used by many businesses for storage and collaboration, was up by 5% to 6.3 billion dollars (£4.3bn), while Azure revenue alone was up by 140%.

Microsoft’s personal-computing division reported $12.7 billion in sales for the December quarter, down 5 percent from a year earlier. That division is the home of services like Windows Azure and products for servers and cloud computing.

There were a lot of good and bad sides to the results that came out from Microsoft’s practices.

Nadella also indicated that he expects the new security and compliance features of Windows 10 will encourage the crucial business market to upgrade, according to Business Insider.

But the future of the company really revolves around the cloud.

Last quarter, Microsoft broke out results for its different business units for the first time and thankfully, the company didn’t make any changes to this process this time around.

The company reported $25.7 billion in revenue, down 2% year-over-year. “Microsoft’s cloud story continues to be solid; while Amazon missed a bit, Microsoft continues to show Wall Street it knows how to set and meet expectations, which the Street values highly”, Merv Adrian, research vice president of Information Management at Gartner, told eWEEK.

Microsoft has reported a five percent growth in its “Intelligent Cloud” division, which includes sales of its Azure public cloud services.

During a call with investors, Nadella and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood also talked about the strong adoption of Windows 10, now available as a full free upgrade for qualified Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users, until July 2016. Sales tanked by 49 per cent compared to the same quarter a year earlier, with Microsoft selling only 4.5 million Lumia phones – mostly at the low end – and the company’s market share falling to just over one per cent by our guestimates. Phone revenues declined almost 50% from the same quarter a year ago.

“The enterprise cloud opportunity is massive, larger than any market we have ever participated in”, Mr Nadella said in a conference call.

This segment, which includes results Windows licensing and devices (Surface, phones, and Xbox), declined 17 percent to $9.4 billion.