WW 866: Squishmallows With Guns - FY24 Q2 earnings, Teams worldwide outage, 1st-run experience redesign

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it earned a net income of $21.9 billion on revenues of $62 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2023. Those figures are up 33 percent and 18 percent, respectively, year-over-year (YOY)

Intelligent Cloud: Azure, AI

Microsoft's biggest business unit delivered $25.9 billion in revenue, up 20 percent YOY and driven primarily by its Azure cloud platform

Azure revenues were up 30 percent in the quarter, 6 points of which Microsoft attributed to "AI services"

Productivity and Business Processes: Microsoft 365

$19.2 billion in revenues, with growth of 13 percent YOY

Office Commercial revenues were up 15 percent

More Personal Computing: Xbox, Windows

Revenues of $16.9 billion, up 19 percent YOY

Gaming revenues surged 49 percent (44 points from Activision Blizzard)

Xbox hardware revenues inched up by 3 percent

Windows revenues from PC makers grew 11 percent in the quarter

Windows

Canary: Voice Clarity comes to more PCs, and Microsoft previews new/old Windows Setup first-run experience

Dev: Minor bug fixes only

Beta: Snap Layout suggestions, new settings in Widgets, and you can now revert to stable (!!)

Microsoft 365

Teams goes down for the count

AI

Microsoft adds deepfake guardrails to Designer AI. So, this wasn't there before now?

FTC is investigating Microsoft/OpenAI and other Big Tech AI partnerships

Xbox

Microsoft can finally bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to the iPhone (and Fortnite is coming back to the iPhone in the EU)

1900 layoffs at Activision Blizzard, Zenimax, and Xbox

Tips and Picks

Tip of the week: Upgrade to passkeys

App pick of the week: Insync

RunAs Radio this week: Software Licensing with Mary Jo Foley

Brown liquor pick of the week: Dailuaine 16

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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