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      Windows, hardware, Xbox sales are dim spots in a solid Microsoft earnings report

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 26 July, 2023 - 18:21 · 1 minute

    Windows, hardware, Xbox sales are dim spots in a solid Microsoft earnings report

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    It has been a tough year for PC companies and companies that make PC components. Companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have all reported big drops in revenue from the hardware that they sell to consumers (though the hardware they sell to other businesses is often doing better).

    Microsoft contributed another data point to that trend today , with fourth-quarter 2023 financial results that showed modest growth (revenue up 8 percent year over year, from $51.9 billion to $56.2 billion), but no thanks to its consumer software and hardware businesses.

    Revenue from the company's More Personal Computing division, which encompasses Windows licenses, Surface PCs and other accessories, Xbox hardware and software and services, and ad revenue, was down 4 percent year over year. This decrease was driven mostly by a drop in sales of Windows licenses to PC makers (down 12 percent because of "PC market weakness") and by reduced hardware sales (down 20 percent, though the company didn't say how much of this drop came from its accessory business and how much came from Surface PCs). Microsoft makes its own PCs and PC accessories and sells the software that most other PC makers use on their hardware, so when the entire PC ecosystem is doing poorly, Microsoft gets hit twice.

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      Microsoft Office 2021 is on its way

      Jim Salter · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 18 February, 2021 - 21:25 · 1 minute

    A screenshot of Microsoft Office.

    Enlarge / The new version of Office will offer easy-toggle Dark Mode settings in many if not all applications. (credit: Microsoft )

    If Microsoft had its way, Office 2021 probably wouldn't be news at all—the Redmond giant would almost certainly prefer that everyone simply subscribe to Microsoft 365 , pay a small monthly or annual fee, and get new features and fixes as they're rolled out. For many if not most Office users, the subscription-based service is the most convenient way to get Office, even when they want to use it as locally installed software rather than doing their work in-browser and on the cloud.

    For the rest of us—and for those environments which Microsoft 365 fat clients inexplicably refuse to support, such as Remote Desktop Servers —there's Office 2019 now, and there will be Office 2021 later this year. There will also be a new Office LTSC (Long Term Service Channel), which trades a 10 percent price hike for a guarantee of longer support periods... longer than the consumer version of Office 2021, that is.

    In reality, the "Long Term Service Channel" version of Office 2021 will still have a shorter support life cycle than that enjoyed by previous versions of Office. Office 2019 had a seven-year support window—Office 2021 LTSC will only offer five. There's no official word yet on the support life cycle of the presumably shorter-lived consumer version of Office 2021.

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