Record Revenue: Is That a Good Thing?
As a new guy at Microsoft, I don’t much care about the stock price. Sure, I have some stock, and will be buying more, but I don’t have enough shares to care deeply about the price. The fact it’s been hovering around $25 for a long time doesn’t bother me as much as it might bother those folks who will be able (and willing) to retire as soon as it gets above $50 again.
I’m more concerned about how we’re doing on innovation and long-term strategy, and also how well we’re managing the business day-to-day.
Regarding the former, things are looking great. Vista is going to be the biggest step forward for Windows in a decade, and Office 12 and Sharepoint are going to rock when they ship later this year. (Hell, they rock already.)
Here’s a good example of why I’m excited about the Sharepoint/Office Server platform …
I just finished taping an interview with Kurt DelBene, the VP who runs our Office Server groups. This interview was for a newsletter that goes out to ISVs around the world, and I thought we’d be spending 5 to 10 minutes covering a high-level look at the cool new features of the Sharepoint platform.
But we got to talking about things like the new BDC and versioning concepts, support for RSS and tight email integration, enterprise content management capabilities, web parts in ASP.NET 2.0, and a bunch of other cool features, and I forgot the time. Suddenly I realized we had taped for 30 minutes, all of it packed full of interesting new information about Office Server. So now I have some editing to do!
Regarding day-to-day management of the business, here’s a good measure of that: todaywe announced 2nd-quarter earnings, which included the highest quarterly revenue in Microsoft history ($11.84 billion), and a net income for the quarter of $3.65 billion. I don’t know much about financial analysis, but I think those sorts of numbers are generally considered a good thing for a business.
Screw the stock price. For now, anyway. 
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 2:39 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on January 26, 2006 at 2:55 pm Dave wrote:
How will benefit the average consumer in their home?
on January 27, 2006 at 9:06 am Doug wrote:
Good question, Dave.
I’m very focused on the large-enterprise market where Sharepoint is the platform that enables all these collaboration and document management sorts of scenarios. The changes in Office 12 for consumers would be more in the area of the UI enhancements — the kind of stuff that Jensen Harris has been blogging about.
It’s interesting to note, if you drill down into the details of Microsoft’s earnings report yesterday, that the growth in revenue is mostly due to growth in enterprise sales. That’s where the action is right now for the Office and Sharepoint product lines, and that’s where the biggest battles with OpenOffice and other competitors will probably take place in the years ahead. UI enhancements may appeal to some users (and will disappoint others, no doubt), but the integration between all the different technology layers is where the most compelling benefits of Office 12 can be found for large organizations.
My 2 cents, as always. Bill and Steve may have a slightly different take.