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Microsoft earnings blow past estimates in every category, beats Street
- baldfat 10y agoSeems like what was good for developers and hackers is good for their bottom line. So glad this "new" Microsoft is working for them as well as for us.
- shmerl 10y agoNew is better, but not quite there yet. They supported AOM codecs initiative, but didn't support Vulkan.
- rubber_duck 10y ago>but didn't support Vulkan Do they really need to ?
- my123 10y agoVulkan works fine on Windows of course, the GPU makers handled it themselves instead.
- cwyers 10y agoJust like there's OpenGL support. id has shipped games that run on it!
- pjmlp 10y agoAnd even Carmack came around on his statement about OpenGL versus DirectX. From this http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.opengl.html http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.opengl.html to this http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-directx-better-opengl/1 http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-direc... "It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point"
- shmerl 10y agoCarmack didn't like OpenGL, and partially he was right about OpenGL's shortcomings. We was wrong however in his proposed solution (using DX). Using lock-in instead of making better open APIs is a really bad idea. Luckily others understood it better than him.
- pjmlp 10y agoThe market and major game studios will decide.
- shmerl 10y agoIndeed, forward thinking studios and developers decided to fix this mess and participated in making Vulkan. Legacy thinking publishers, not so much. They aren't innovators in any sense of the word.
- pjmlp 10y agoWhich is only available on Android 7 (0.2%), GNU/Linux, Windows (no major titles announced, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_supp...) and Swift (yet to launch, developers also get NVN). Ah, and when using Unreal Engine, Crytek or Unity it doesn't matter.
- shmerl 10y ago> Which is only available on... It's available anywhere where developers have access to the drivers. Which highlights the point exactly. Those who care to fix the lock-in mess, help. Those who want to keep the balkanized status quo, actively prevent improving the situation. Trying to justify such behavior isn't just hypocritical - it's absurd.
- shmerl 10y agoDepends on how you define need. If you want to have a common open standard - absolutely. Same as with HTML instead of some ActiveX abomination. But if you want to have balkanized lock-in mess, then it's a different story. As long as MS has the notion of lock-in going on, I don't buy this whole "reformed" MS story.
- rubber_duck 10y agoI don't get what you're trying to say. Vulkan needs nothing from MS it's purely a driver thing, as for MS using DX over it I guess Vulkan is far too new and DX is proven and something you control (I wouldn't bet my core platform tech on something done by a committee either, maybe once it's a defacto standard), meanwhile GL is garbage compared to it, talk a aout Balkanization, good luck writing dx11 level features that work across two GL drivers.
- cwyers 10y agoshmerl mentions Vulkan on every thread he possibly can, it feels like. It's his hobbyhorse. I think an Xbox owes him money or something.
- pjmlp 10y agoWithout having any understanding what people on the games industry actually care about.
- shmerl 10y agoAnd you apparently represent those who profit from lock-in. Is that why you justify it all the time? Because no one would objectively do it. I never saw an engineer who said "lock-in is good, more lock-in please!". Those who do it, are backwards thinking managers like the one from this quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...
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- pjmlp 10y agoThey will do it when Apple and Sony do it.
- shmerl 10y agoOther lock-in freaks aren't an excuse for being one. Apple and Sony also didn't try to claim they are "new".
- samfisher83 10y agoThey made a lot more money in 2013 and 2014. So it might be better for developers, but maybe not the bottom line.
- adventured 10y ago$5.2 billion in net income for the quarter. That competes very well with 2014, in which they had $22b in annualized net income. In 2011 for example, they generated $23b in net income, their highest profit. The difference? Profits from the Windows division. It would be a context drop to ignore the change - one which they could do absolutely nothing about - when it comes to how people are buying and using computing today (PCs sales have fallen significantly from the peak). Nothing Microsoft could have done was going to stop PC sales from falling (a less disastrous Windows 8 would have slowed it some). I'd argue they're in better shape today versus 2011, when their profit was slightly higher. Today's Microsft is far less vulnerable to the erosion in the PC market. For Microsoft to not be in the midst of collapsing with the down shift in the PC market, and the loss of importance for the PC as the former center of the computing universe, is a staggering accomplishment that few have managed in tech history.
- wehadfun 10y agoLooks Azure is working well.
- cobookman 10y agoAzure no, O365 yes. They are doing some funky accounting.
- holydude 10y agoI am glad as well. It is funny how ms reinvented itself and how apple became new "old ms"
- giarc 10y agoFrom a high level it is looking that way. Response to recent MS products has been good (surface and surface studio). Apple can't get away from negative press (the headphone jack, lack of innovative features, lack of ports on macbook, touchbar etc). I am hoping that Apple really knocks it out of the park with the iPhone 8 given the 10 year anniversary an dall.
- nikanj 10y agoLooking at recent trends, I think the innovation on iPhone 8 is going to be 1) Slimmer than ever (remember to bring your battery pack) 2) No-bezel screen (remember to bring your bumper case) 3) Force touch on the home button too
- oculusthrift 10y ago4) new charging mechanism that isn't compatible with the macbook
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago0) The range splits into two model streams, one of which is called iPhone Pro.
- giarc 10y agoI know this is said a lot, but who are the users asking for cheaper phones? Here on HN, where presumably most people are technologically inclined, the sentiment is "I'll take a bigger phone for large battery life." But all phone manufacturers are going the opposite. Are regular users asking for smaller phones? There must be a user group that wants it smaller and smaller (actually just thinner).
- bcaulfield 10y agoMakes me wonder what a "hacker" portfolio might look like -- companies building product and services people who build things use for a living.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>Makes me wonder what a "hacker" portfolio might look like Lots of concentration and no voting rights.
- xt00 10y agoYea the smart play Microsoft is making is to go to businesses and say "look you could go with us or AWS.. AWS essentially says "good luck you're on your own" and we will hold your hand and our premier support people will come to your business and set it all up for you and show your like 2 IT guys how to manage things.. They will make a ton of money on cloud because a huge amount of businesses are basically lagging behind the rest of the industry with cloud adoption and getting rid of their old servers and hosting services.
- tracker1 10y agoJust licensing alone for office is enough to drive a high adoption... $10/month/user is easier to account for in a billing cycle than $200-300/computer every two years.. the cost is more consistent for businesses, and the revenue is more consistent for MS... Likewise on Azure... Azure based ActiveDirectory, SQL as a service, and simpler deployments (compared to AWS) are a win... I've used Azure at a few positions, and am currently feeling like I'm pulling my hair out with AWS by comparison, just getting some simple deployment strategies. It feels like Azure strikes the "just right" experience better than aws. At least from my limited knowledge and experience.
- MichaelGG 10y agoWait til you try GCE/GCP. It's so clean, smooth, fast, and cheap. The products so easy to work with. Azure is great targeting for MS's Enterprise customers but I've had nothing but problems. Terrible perf, weird products, and that horrible UI that just causes pain. I know at least 2 companies that have significant Azure credits but instead pay for GCP because Azure was just so painful.
- shiftpgdn 10y agoGod damn Azure performance is SO bad sometimes. I don't think they have the level of monitoring needed to clean up "bad neighbors" on shared servers. I've seen 2x performance increases by simply deleting a virtual machine and recreating it so it gets placed on a different box.
- tabeth 10y agoI hope Microsoft uses some of that profit and fixes Azure Blobs. I was hoping to use them instead of S3 for static site hosting (ended up going with Gitlab) and it doesn't support even the most basic of functionality. [1] [1] https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions/6417741-static-website-hosting-in-azure-blob-storage https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions...
- tracker1 10y agoSeems like the best you can really do is have a micro instance running nginx with some reverse-proxy rules. Which is a bit of a shame. It looks like you can't even do what you want with Azure Functions.
- jlian 10y agoThis might not meet your needs but you can use Azure App Service (free) to host a static website https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/acoat/2016/01/28/publish-a-static-web-site-using-azure-web-apps/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/acoat/2016/01/28/publish-a-... EDIT: also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31653643/how-to-deploy-a-simple-static-micro-site-on-microsoft-azure http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31653643/how-to-deploy-a-...
- alpb 10y agoI would not expect it to get implemented soon. It is not a very common use case. I don't think there are a lot of people/businesses run static HTML websites. So unless someone at MS convinces themselves that this is indeed a nice-to-have feature, it probably won't get implemented. Same thing happened with ICMP (ping) support in Azure: Azure does not support ICMP. I personally expected this feature to get implemented for 4 years I worked there because I needed it myself many times. Turns out people can totally live without it and it is not a deal breaker. Last week this request got rejected for a foreseeable future. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggestions/3346609-icmp-support-for-azure-websites-roles-cloud-serv https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggesti... For instance, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) support static websites, and in addition you can use the "gsutil rsync" command, which works just like rsync to upload your website with the Google Cloud SDK. I was impressed when I first found that out. And it works out of the box just fine, I'll migrate my website to this soon. Disclaimer: former Azure employee now working at Google.
- agustamir 10y agoDoes drive home the point that making consumer products is really hard? I mean their Surface, phone business seems down but B2B(Azure) is thriving[0]. Comparing that to Apple's business wouldn't be all that fair? [0]http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/26/microsoft-reports-26-1-billion-in-q2-2017-revenue-azure-up-93-but-phone-down-81-and-surface-down-2/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/26/microsoft-reports-26-1-bil...
- Analemma_ 10y agoSurface is only down 2%, practically flat, which is actually pretty impressive considering the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book are over a year old and expecting refreshes soon.
- pjmlp 10y agoFrom the look of what is on display in consumer stores across a few European countries I visit regularly, I am betting they will wipe out the lower segment of hybrid tablets and netbooks. Nowadays the majority of those devices on display are running Windows 10, not Android or OEM variant of GNU/Linux.
- digi_owl 10y agoMaybe. But after having used a Win10 tablet for a while i find that the whole "app" side of things feels bolted on. If you want to do some serious file manipulations you invariably has to drop back to the age old file explorer and the related Win32 file picker window. And those are anything but fun to operate via a touch screen.
- smnc 10y ago> The Street also expects Microsoft to formally announce 700 job cuts as part of its previously announced plan to cut 2,850 jobs by June 2017. Interesting, the linked article calls it an "effort to update skills across the company."
- nikanj 10y agoOut with the old, in with the new. Why pay a senior $250k, when you can pay a junior $100k, and get more hours out of them too?
- devonkim 10y agoIn a certain respect I can also see that meaning "we don't sell WebTV anymore, I think we can lose people that were maintaining that crap." I mean heck, they shut it down only in late 2013 years and years after it left consumer consciousness, who knows how many random enterprises were trying to keep paying Microsoft to maintain the business equivalents of Microsoft Bob, right?
- perseusprime11 10y agoMicrosoft's board made the best call in selecting Satya Nadella. Bringing an outsider was the sexy thing to do but I think today's earnings show the wiseness in picking the right person for the job.
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- ChuckMcM 10y agoNicely done Microsoft. Also interesting note in the earnings release[1] is this, "Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 10% (up 11% in constant currency) driven by increased revenue per search and search volume." A collection of businesses that make up most of the revenue and search-advertising with strong growth year over year. What's not to like? [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q2/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q2...
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- ScottBurson 10y agoWow, this post is 10 hours old and I'm the first to point out how bad Satya Nadella is making Steve Ballmer look. Maybe it really is a new Microsoft.