Microsoft remains massively profitable, investors await AI payoff Microsoft has tried to convince investors that AI is paying off, but they appear unimpressed by news of customer adoption and revenue revealed Tuesday in the software giant's Q4 and full-year results for 2024. For the full year, Microsoft hauled in $245.1 billion and racked up $88 billion in net income – up 16 and 22 percent …
Windows market share (server) has been declining year on year for a while now, with the primary reason that companies have been slowly moving to containers, and serverless, both of which run on Linux. I mean, it is technically possible to run Windows containers, but I think it's well-established that Linux is the way to go.
Yup, got that right. Windows Server is dying. Everyone is migrating to MacOS Server, for sure. Oh, errr...wait. Nevermind.
I know, let's get rid of the Start Menu and put all the icons in the bottom center of the desktop screen. Name it Windows 11. That will be innovative! No one has done that before.... Oh, except MacOS.
I'll toss a Fanboi icon on this post just because it seems that way. I am simply pointing out Microsoft isn't exactly leading the industry as the trendsetter.
"The GitHub Copilot has won 77,000 users in the two years since its debut, and CEO Satya Nadella noted the revenue it generates tops all of GitHub earnings at the time Microsoft acquired the code locker in 2018."
I suspect the _expenses_ of GitHub Copilot _also_ tops all of GitHub's expenses at the time of acquiry, too. But I can see why she didn't want to focus on that side of the coin during an investors' call.
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I think many M$ investors are wondering how the dividend yield can remain firmly below 1% when the company is so profitable. Especially given that (in the UK at least) a savings account with a mutual can yield over 4.5%, and renewable energy funds over 7%.
OK, the price of M$ shares has more than tripled in the last 5 years - but is that trend likely to continue, if the execs keep on trousering all the much-trumpeted profits in personal bonuses?
He answered by offering a scenario in which a sales person receives an email from a customer – at which point Copilot steps in, detects that the mail relates to an order, links the mail to a CRM record, then writes and sends an email that references info from the CRM.
This is nothing new. The problem with Copilot is that it might feasibly misinterpret an order and deliver ten or more times what the customer was expecting. Exaggeration? One example is where I await the On-Call story where someone had mistakenly used the comma as a decimal point in Excel. And woe betide anyone hitting the E key while entering a number (Yes, I'd like 12E3 widgets please).
Ok this could happen without Copulate, but humans have a tendency to query things that don't sound right.
Pre-pandemic I've written systems that have similar functionality using old-school programming techniques. Validation of stuff automatically processed from an incoming email was something I was particularly careful with.
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