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Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that its net income in the latest quarter rose 51 percent, boosted by higher sales of Windows and Office software to businesses.
In last year's quarter, Microsoft deferred some revenue from Windows sales. Had it not done so, net income would have been only 16 percent higher this year in comparison.
For the fiscal first quarter, which ended in September, net income rose to $5.4 billion, or 62 cents per share, from $3.6 million, or 40 cents per share, in the same period last year.
Revenue increased 25 percent to $16.2 billion, from $12.9 billion a year ago.
Microsoft beat Wall Street's expectations on both counts. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast net income of 55 cents per share on $15.8 billion in revenue.
Microsoft said the increase in sales to businesses of the newest versions of its Windows operating system, Office programs and server software made up for softer-than-expected revenue from consumer PC buying in the quarter.
While there's enthusiasm for the new version of Office, according to a survey of 950 IT professionals conducted by Dimensional Research, there's no rush to roll it out: Enterprise IT views Office 2010 as a complex and daunting upgrade.
Eighty-five percent of survey respondents plan to upgrade to Office 2010 eventually, but only 18 percent have plans to deploy broadly in 2010. As of now, only 4 percent have Office 2010 fully deployed in their environments, and 52 percent have not deployed it in any way. The rest are deploying Office 2010 on test machines or on new machines only.
A majority of survey respondents (78 percent) cited concerns keeping them from doing a migration this year, with the top concerns being the new ribbon interface, compatibility with current applications and licensing.
"At this time it seems that migration concerns are outweighing confidence of a speedy Office 2010 migration, said Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst for Dimensional Research.
The Ribbon user interface, where a set of toolbars are arranged on tabs across the top of an Office document, was introduced in Office 2007 and enhanced in Office 2010. Still, Office 2003 users remain intimidated by it. According to the survey, 45 percent of respondents are worried about training employees on the new Ribbon interface. Incompatibility with add-in applications was also listed as worrisome by 33 percent of survey respondents. Incompatibility with Office 2003 formats was listed as worrisome by the same amount of respondents, 33 percent.
Titled "A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org," the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.
A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. "If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?" according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.
"When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district," states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.
Obviously Microsoft is feeling the pain of losing some of its dominance in the office suite category of software. I recommend that my college students download Open Office all the time. I have never received any complaints or experienced a problem with their files. I have used Open Office, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 (Mac) as well as Apple'siWorks suite and found that Open Office correctly opened some Word files that iWork's Pages cannot handle. I highly recommend using Open Office. Microsoft is running scared and they should.
In spite of being viewed as the "other guys" in some Mac users' minds, Microsoft has generally put out an excellent productivity suite for the Mac with Microsoft Office. Though the latest package is still not on par with the Windows version (you get only the four main programs--a big difference when you consider the Windows version has 10), Microsoft made a big leap with this latest version for the Mac in several other ways. Not only has it nearly reached feature parity (and cross compatibility) with the Mac counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it has finally added Outlook, the e-mail and scheduling client Mac business fans have been clamoring for for years.
Once we dug deep into the feature set of Office 2011 for Mac, we saw there were several enhancements that made the whole suite better, and some of the niftier tweaks are even Mac-exclusive. Certainly many Mac users will look first at Apple's iWork for a productivity suite, and it is a great office suite in its own right. But if you work with primarily Windows users who use Office, it's tough to beat the automatic compatibility of using the same programs. Add the ease of compatibility with a strong feature set across the entire suite and you have a desktop office package that's almost a must-have in both large and small businesses, and even home productivity settings.
One of the major new changes to the suite (on the Windows side, too) is the ability to collaborate and share your work using Web apps. New Coauthoring requires that you use SharePoint Foundation 2010 for enterprise use, but for personal or small businesses, you can save and access files over SkyDrive (25GB of available online storage) on Windows Live with a free registration.
All of the new tweaks to the interface and each of the apps in the suite make Office 2011 for Mac a great option, but with the rise of cloud-based computing and online office suites like Google Docs, we wonder how long the big desktop apps like Office will remain on top. This latest Office client for Mac is definitely a solid offering, but how long can Microsoft hold on to its dominance?
Given Oracle's recent decision to pull the plug on OpenSolaris, there has been considerable concern over the past few months about the future of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite.
Both projects were inherited by Oracle when it acquired Sun early this year.
Tuesday brought good news for the legions of worried OpenOffice.org users, however, when the community of developers working on the project announced that they have formed an independent foundation, and will be using the name LibreOffice for their version--or "fork"--of the software, unless Oracle agrees to donate the OpenOffice.org brand.
Now known as The Document Foundation, the newly independent OpenOffice.org community aims to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter for the project. It has invited Oracle to become a member and to donate the OO.o brand, but I haven't heard back from the company yet with any indication of its intentions.
Microsoft has added new capabilities to its online Microsoft Office companion service that allow users to embed PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets on their own websites.
Launched in June, Microsoft Office Web Apps has already been used, the company claims, by 20 million people, despite some negative reviews. The service offers the ability to make quick edits to Excel, Word, OneNote and PowerPoint documents.
Since the launch, the company has received more than 25,000 suggestions for how to improve the service, according to Microsoft senior product manager Evan Lew, in a video accompanying the blog announcement of the new features.
The timing of the upgrade is fortuitous for Microsoft insofar as Oracle announced at its Open World conference this week that its cloud-based Office productivity suite, based on Open Office, is nearing release as well.
With Microsoft Office Web Apps, users will now be able to embed PowerPoint presentations and Excel worksheets, tables and charts on an external website or blog page. With Excel, as the original document is updated, the embedded version will change as well.
Improvements have been made to the user's ability to edit files online as well. Spreadsheet users can now add lines, pies and bar charts to their worksheets directly from their browser. Microsoft has also opened up the Office.com image library so users can add images to their PowerPoint presentations.
And Excel worksheets now join Word and PowerPoint documents in their ability to be easily viewed from a mobile phone.
The company is also expanding the global availability of the Office apps to seven additional countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland.
In addition to adding muscle to Microsoft Office Web Apps, the company has also boosted capabilities of Windows companion online service, Windows Live.
While Office for Mac users continue to wait for the Office 2011 release later this year, Microsoft has released maintenance updates for the existing 2004 and 2008 variants. Office for Mac 2004 v11.6.0 features improved security, with a number of fixes for vulnerabilities.
