No stormy weather on Microsoft's horizon – as quarterly commercial cloud cash balloons 41%

Microsoft announced healthy revenues for its third-quarter financial results on Wednesday, citing a growing demand in Microsoft 365 and its cloud services. In an earnings conference call, CEO Satya Nadella gushed to investors and analysts about Redmond’s strong performance. “It’s the result of picking the right secular trends …

[Phil O'Sophical]

picking the right secular trends

I always thought cloud was more of a religious thing.

[Updraft102]

“Windows 10 is active on more than 800 million devices,

It very well may be.

and is the most secure and productive OS,”

It most certainly is not.

[bombastic bob]

You dare to defy the market-droids?

(I agree - it most certainly is NOT)

Windows 10 is to productivity as 70's Disco is to Music (or Etch a Sketch is to Art)

Windows 10 is to security as a ripped condom is to birth control

[Anonymous Coward]

So Azure is still on target to be #1 in public cloud then. It's just a matter of time if this continues.

[Anonymous Coward]

And seems like I'm not the only one to have realised that. Microsoft just exceeded $1 Trillion market value.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So Azure is still on target to be #1 in public cloud then. It's just a matter of time if this continues."

Just like Windows mobile?

[Anonymous Coward]

This confirms that upper level manglement do not understand either what drives their business or that they don't care as long as they can maintian or increase profits quarterly while building an ending to their business continuance.

[johnnyblaze]

This is what the cloud is really about - syphoning huge piles of cash to the providers. Does the cloud really make a big difference to business? Does the cloud actually save them money? I think the answer to the first question is marginal at best, but these days, enterprises are almost told if you're not 'in the cloud' you're out of business. I also think the cloud ends up costing businesses more in the long run, but they're almost too afraid to say anything. The cloud is about lock-in, selling extra services that might not even be needed, and getting that companies data onto the providers servers.

When all this blows up big time, companies will scamper back to their on-prem systems, and maybe finally realize what a massive con the cloud is.

[TonyJ]

No...'the cloud' in, and of itself, is no con.

The con comes from management who don't comprehend what they are buying into: that it's a panacea, that all of their IT/technical/technology headaches will all go away. It doesn't need staff to manage and backups just happen. It's all self-healing and can migrate transparently across the cloud hosts data centres in whatever continent and just keep running ad infinitum.

Oh and it'll be cheaper.

But it's simply misunderstanding what 'the cloud' is and how it should be managed and designed and supported properly - just the same as if you were putting servers in a data centre you owned or a co-lo.

Management and companies are conning themselves.

[Terafirma-NZ]

Customer demand

We all know no customer demands any Microsoft product, try

"We worded things to ensure all customers have to buy more and use more"

together with

"We continue to market by shouting loud about cloud or die to no one in particular"

The last line there begin the big one. How many times have you had an Exec come in and say I saw this cool thing we have to have it. Or "Microsoft told me everyone's doing it.