Microsoft's Windows revenues down 6 percent
Add to 
del.icio.us
 Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
Jan. 20, 2012
Late yesterday, Microsoft revealed its most recent quarterly results, and reports that its Windows revenues are down
about 6 percent from its previous quarter. The lower numbers didn't surprise anybody, since the company had warned that
they would be softer.
But for the last three months, Microsoft not only saw its Windows division revenues fall, but its business division
grew a paltry 3 percent despite strong sales of MS Exchange Server and its SharePoint software.
This compares to eleven percent growth in its server and tools group, with online services up about ten percent and
the entertainment division seeing revenues climb fifteen per cent to almost $4.25 billion.
X-Box Live subscriptions were up about 31 percent, however. Microsoft had warned that PC sales were going to be worse
than expected, down about two to four percent in its estimates, in part due to equipment shortages following last year’s
floods in Thailand.
Those issues will last at least until the next quarter, Microsoft said in an earnings call with analysts yesterday.
But it wasn’t all down to the floods either, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations Bill Koefoed explained.
Customers were faced with competing form factors-– a nice way of saying that tablets are selling very fast and that the
software giant still hasn’t a good-enough operating system for that market.
The collapse in popularity of laptops and netbooks was also blamed, with the systems falling from eight percent of
the total PC market last year to just two percent today.
“We are pleased with our results this quarter, despite the decline in personal computer sales,” said Microsoft’s CFO
Peter Klein. “We are well positioned for future growth.”
In other Microsoft news
For the past nineteen years, Microsoft's Windows operating system has been using the NTFS file system and it
has done a pretty good job so far. But now it's time to make a small upgrade.
But now, Microsoft has created a new file system that builds on NTFS. Dubbed "Resilient File System" or ReFS for
short, Microsoft's latest file system will be delivered with Windows 8 Server and will become the basic foundation of
storage applications for Windows Clients, says Microsoft.
Overall, ReFS will be used with Windows 8's Storage Spaces, a feature in Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 Client
that pools data storage for use by different computers and servers.
Storage Spaces and ReFS have been designed to complement each other as components of a complete storage system,
claims the software behemoth.
Microsoft's file system development manager Surendra Verma says "We believe ReFS will significantly advance our state
of the art for storage."
"We will implement ReFS in a staged evolution of the feature. First as a storage system for Windows Server, then as
storage for clients, and then ultimately as a boot volume. This is the same approach we have used with new file systems
in the past," added Verma.
To be sure, NTFS was introduced by Microsoft in Windows NT back in 1993. However, Verma and his boss, Windows group
president Steven Sinofsky, were quick to point out that ReFS does not replace NTFS and that it builds on the existing
system. ReFS reuses NTFS code responsible for the Windows file system semantics, Verma said.
"The code reuse simply implements the file system interface (read, write, open, close, change notification, etc),
maintains in-memory file and volume state, enforces security, and maintains memory caching and synchronization for file
data," says Verma.
"This reuse ensures a high degree of compatibility with the features of NTFS that we're carrying forward," he added.
The simple difference between ReFS and NTFS is that the code uses a new engine to implement on-disk structures, such
as the Master File Table, to represent files and directories. It's this implementation, Verma wrote, "where a significant
portion of the innovation behind ReFS lies".
Source: Microsoft Corp.
Add to
del.icio.us
Digg this
Get a great Ubuntu Linux dedicated server for less than $3 a day!
Share on Twitter
| 
