In ten minutes the @microsoft earnings call kicks off. Due to a stupendous oversight, I'm on it and will be livetweeting it. Here we go...
(Sadly I am muted. This is probably for the best.)
Right now we're being treated to Ellie Goulding's "Burn." I suspect this will be the high point of the earnings call.
Yup, I was right. We're now listening to Coldplay's "Sparks."
Pink's "Just Like Fire" now. I wonder if there's any thought given to the musical selection. I mean, "99 Problems" is probably not going to fly right before you announce cloud earnings...
And we're started in "listen only mode" because Microsoft doesn't get that Twitter is a thing.
A few execs are on the call, including Satya. We start with disclaimers because the SEC has remarkably little sense of humor.
Satya kicks off saying that they're off to a strong start. $33 billion in quarterly revenue. Commercial Cloud is doing well.
Satya lists off business units like he's reading a feature checkbox table. It is Microsoft; he probably is.
"Just this week we announced a partnership with SAP, making Azure the preferred destination for--" everyone sad.
Now talking about Azure AI. Because everything's AI.
MSFT is down in after-hours because Azure growth declined to 59%. That's horseshit when it applies to AWS and it's horseshit when applied to Azure. These are tens of billions in annual revenue. Adding 59% is freaking killing it.
Now talking about security and compliance. "We have such services to talk about." It's like a roll call for enterprise compliance regimes.
As @dina_bass points out, there's no such thing as an apples-to-apples cloud revenue comparison. This is why Gartner and others exist.
I'd argue that relative market share doesn't matter to technology selection. If you go Azure or AWS, you'll be fine. Really. Both are safe, stable platforms. Pick one, go all in. I care not which.
Satya now mentions LinkedIn without stopping to apologize for failing to deliver on the wonderful amazing thing it could be but very clearly isn't. Instead they're offering "skill assessments."
Their CFO is talking about r-Poo, which I pretend is a commentary on the programming language and not how you pronounce "Average Revenue Per User" as an acronym.
Now talking about Intelligent Cloud as a segment. No word yet on Moron Cloud.
Intelligent Cloud as a segment includes not just @azure, but also Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, GitHub, and consulting. And possibly sales of Xbox controllers I presume because why the hell not.
And sadly I have a conflict so have to bail from the call at this point. Thanks for listening--and helping me test a custom twitter client. Onward!
