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Sunday, July 25, 2010

Weekly Wrap-Up: July 18-24, 2010

Follow along as I briefly discuss important news in the Microsoft world in this Weekly Wrap-Up for the week of July 18-24, 2010.

Microsoft Earning Statements for FY 2010

It’s been a successful year for Microsoft, during its FY 2010 Microsoft was able to produce its highest revenue and net income to date. Most notably, this was due to its release of Windows 7 and Office 2010. Two products, which I think the world has taken quite nicely to. For the quarter, Microsoft was able to make $16.04 billion in revenue, a 22% increase, and net income of $4.52 billion. Further numbers for the quarter include operating income of $5.93 billion and diluted earnings per share of $0.51 per share. Of course, these numbers only represent that last quarter of Microsoft’s FY 2010. For the entire year, Microsoft managed to make $62.48 billion in revenue, with $18.76 billion in net income. These earnings are very good for Microsoft, especially amid the economic crisis we currently are experiencing.

Microsoft Begins Providing Search Results for Yahoo!

Remember the big search and advertisement deal Microsoft and Yahoo! Made last year? Well, Microsoft is now providing some of the search results to Yahoo! I’m not a huge Yahoo! User (I do have and maintain a Yahoo! Account for comparison reasons and testing), but this does prove interesting and something worth checking out in the future.

PC Market Share, Q2, 2010

Among the many earnings releases being announced right now, it stands to reason that PC Market Share is also now available. Numbers really haven’t changed drastically, save for one competitor, that’s right, Apple. I was very surprised by this, after-all, during the so-called economic crisis that we’re in, how do people have the money to go out and spend $1800 on a new computer. Well, either way, Apple now controls nearly 10% of the US market and 4.2% of the world-wide market. Apple still doesn’t belong to the top five worldwide computer makers, however. The worldwide sales stand as follows, HP (14.7 million units), Dell (10.7 million units), Acer (10.5 million units), Lenovo (8.3 million units), and Toshiba/ASUS (4.25 million units). The US numbers stand as follows: HP (4.65 million), Dell (4.3 million), Acer (2 million), Apple (1.65 million), and Toshiba (1.6 million). Dell and HP are neck and neck for first and second place. Really, it could be either one to take place in the next couple of quarters. It seems like HP’s really picked up its game, as they used to be a PC maker I would avoid, now, if it wasn’t for Lenovo, I may actually consider an HP again, maybe.

Windows Live … Was Down?!

Shock, horror, amazement, these were words that probably didn’t go through the minds of people yesterday when some of the Windows Live Services went down for a brief moment. People were a bit confused, however, when they visited Live.com or home.live.com or any variation and were brought to a “cannot find this page” screen in their browser. The downage seemed to have only affected the minor services, such as SkyDrive, Sync, etc. It did not affect the most popular service, Hotmail and Messenger, and from what I can tell, no data was lost. Further, as the downage continued users were redirected to a Bing search (or whatever their default search engine was) for the site that was entered into the address bar. Really, there shouldn’t be too much fuss about this, no data was lost, it happened on a Saturday, and the major services were still operational. We can just file this as a non-issue.

Zune 4.7 for Windows Phone

If you’re a developer or news analyst that received a Windows Phone from Microsoft, you also received access to Zune 4.7. This earlier build of the next version of Zune offers support for Windows Phone. Users, with this version, will be able to sync their Windows Phone to the service. Zune allows for application integration, music and video syncing, and much more. Currently, the build is only available for private testing. You can check out a closer look at it at Paul Thurrott’s Windows Phone Secrets Blog.

Windows Phone for Developers

And while I’m discussing Windows Phone, developers got their first peek of this device earlier this week (well, last week now). The phones will be delivered to developers on a continual basis, however, the phones are limited, of course, so not every developer will be able to get one. If you are interested in getting a device, make sure to sign up on the Windows Phone Developers site.

Wrapping It Up

That’s it for this week, I’ll post another Weekly Wrap-Up next week with more Microsoft News, so stay tuned. As always, you can follow me on Twitter for more, though shorter, updates with what’s going on at Microsoft.

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