Author: Clinton

Microsoft has released their financial report for their fiscal year Q3 2017 that ended in March.  The company reported revenue of $23.6 billion for the quarter which was down slightly from what analysts had expected.  Their expectation was $23.62 billion and it has impacted their stock in after hours trading.  The positive however were around Microsoft’s cloud solutions and Office.  Cloud revenue, principally Azure, were up 11% to $6.8 billion year-over-year.  Productivity and Business Processes increased by 22% with Office products revenue increasing by 7%.  Office consumer products rose 15% and Dynamics saw a 10% for the quarter.

A bit of a surprise in the report was the falling Microsoft Surface revenue.  It fell 26% for the quarter despite the launch of the Surface Studio.  The lack of significant hardware upgrades in the lineup likely impacted this the most and there is only rumor and conjecture at this point when the Surface Pro will get a technology refresh.  Overall, personal technology numbers fell by 7% to $8.8 billion.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has just posted their first quarter 2017 results and they are nothing short of breathtaking.  The company’s revenue was $24.75 billion in the quarter, up 22% from the same period last year, and beat all expectations.  Operating income increased to $6.58 billion, up from the $5.3 billion for the previous year.  Netted out, the company made $5.4 billion in net income for the quarter.

Digging further, advertising revenues were up for the company in the quarter.  They rose to $21.4 billion while the Other Revenue for the company grew by $1 billion to $3.0 billion.  The Other Revenue section of the financial report as this is where hardware sales (Google Pixel, Google Home, Chromecast) are lumped together with things such as enterprise sales.  An increase here is a good reflection on how those business units are doing overall.

Google TalkBack for Android has a new update rolling out that brings some new services and features to the accessibility app.  For those who may not know what TalkBack is, it is designed for the blind or visually impaired to be able to use their Android device as the content on the screen is read back to them.  This new update brings a new Speech Verbosity feature that allows users to choose just how much feedback is spoken to them.  Before this update, TalkBack read everything on the screen.  Now you can be a bit more selective with it which should speed things up a bit.

Another improvement is the ability to hear feedback when screen magnification is turned on as well as hearing character count in password fields.  This feature requires that you have at least Chrome 56 on your device to work.

Bolstered by their memory chip division, Samsung reported an operating profit of $8.75 Billion in the first quarter of 2017.  It is their highest quarterly profit since 2013.  The chip division accounted for $5.58 Billion in profit while overall revenue for the entire company was up 2% according to the report from Reuters.

The trend of profits should continue for Samsung in this quarter and the smartphone division should play a significant role in it.  The Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus are shipping now and both are doing excellent in sales and pre-sales.  Indeed, pre-sales of the S8 lineup has already outpaced the popular S7 an S7 Edge from last year.

A new update to Google’s Gboard is rolling out in the Play Store that brings a big jump in support of Indic languages.  With this update, 22 new languages are supported and through the use of Machine Learning and working with natural speakers of the languages throughout India, transliteration and keyboard layouts are included for all of the languages.  The update now brings the total number of languages supported up to 185.

The new languages supported include: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo (Devanagari, Bengali), Dogri (Devanagari, Arabic), Gujarati, Hindi (Devanagari, Hinglish), Kannada, Kashmiri (Devanagari, Arabic), Konkani (Devanagari, Latin), Maithili (Devanagari), Malayalam, Manipuri (Bengali), Marathi (Devanagari), Nepali (Devanagari), Odia, Punjabi (Gurmukhi, Arabic), Sanskrit (Devanagari), Santali (Ol chiki, Latin), Sindhi (Devanagari, Arabic), Tamil, Telugu, Urdu (Arabic).

For those who have one of these as their mother language, this update will make it much easier to communicate with others, especially with the transliteration feature.

AT&T, the second largest mobile carrier in the United States, has released their first quarter financials.  The company reported revenues of $39.4 billion for the quarter, a drop from the $40.5 billion the carrier reported in the same quarter last year.  $17.2 billion of the revenue is contributed to the wireless division, down 4.4% over the previous year.  The company reported that the reduction in revenue was attributed to the low number of equipment upgrades made by subscribers as well as the the lower ARPU (average revenue per user) thanks to recently adopted unlimited plans.

All of this contributed to a drop in net profit for the company.  For the quarter, the company made $3.5 billion, down from the $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2016.  The carrier has $3.2 billion in free flow cash available.