Microsoft beats Wall Street view on high demand for cloud products

Revenue in Microsoft’s productivity and business processes unit, which includes Office commercial products, rose 5% on a constant-currency basis.

Microsoft Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to 20.6 million. The declining PC market still affected the company, even though Windows 10 released last summer, as Windows OEM Pro revenue fell 6 per cent.

This segment, which includes results Windows licensing and devices (Surface, phones, and Xbox), declined 17 percent to $9.4 billion. During the last quarter, nearly $1 billion in revenues was attributed to Bing with a 29% YoY growth, implying a more accelerated growth than chief rival Google Search.

If company revenue hits anywhere between $24 billion and $25.75 billion, there’s a good reason then for investors to be ecstatic. A recent patent shows that the tech company is working on a Surface Pen with a rechargeable battery which is interesting if we take a look at the market trends these days and what Microsoft faced last summer.

“It was a strong holiday season for Microsoft, highlighted by Surface and Xbox”, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said in a statement.

Visa Inc. (V) shares are up $1.42 to $70.75 in after-hours trading Thursday after the company reported its Q116 earnings results.

The company posted $5 billion in net income, or 62 cents per share, on revenue of $23.8 billion.

Domain squatting by companies is nothing new, and perhaps it’s nothing special this time either.

The cloud growth is a bright spot for the company and is important to watch as the market moves toward greater use of cloud resources for software, infrastructure and application development.

Meanwhile, analysts say Microsoft is also rapidly transforming its commercial-computing division by encouraging corporate customers to run their businesses on Microsoft’s servers.

After accounting for almost $2 billion in deferred revenue and a few hundred million more in restructuring and integration charges among other adjustments, Microsoft reported non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.78 and revenues of $25.69 billion. While www.surfacelaptop.com is a no-brainer, www.surfacecar.com also redirects to Microsoft’s Surface portal.

Pic: MicrosoftWindows Phone started off life as a promising alternative to Android and iOS five years ago.

Microsoft’s aggressive campaign to promote Windows 10 has already led to its deployment on more than 200 million devices since its July release.

Investors will be looking at Microsoft’s earnings to gauge how much of its financial stability is still coupled to its traditional PC business and how much it will grow in Cloud and other services.