සුභානි 2

සුභානි 2

කතාවේ සම්පුර්ණ ගෞරවය එහි මුල් රචකයාට හිමිවේ.. 
wela katha Sinhala

Who needs Windows?

Microsoft ( sales soared 25% in the last three months on the back of cloud, Xbox and, yes, even the Surface tablet and Nokia smartphones.

This is a new Microsoft that doesn’t need to rely on its operating system to support it. Windows sales were just OK in the last quarter: Sales to businesses were up 10% and consumer upgrades were up just a bit, but consumer PC sales were down 1%.

The real story was in the cloud, which is now the primary focus of the company, according to new  Sales of cloud services to businesses grew by a whopping 128% last quarter, driven primarily by the company’s Office and Azure platforms. Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft’s cloud, Nadella said on a conference call with investors Thursday.

Office, which recently began offering a subscription model for consumers, now has 7 million  Microsoft said. That’s up 25% over the previous quarter.

But it wasn’t just software driving Microsoft’s sales growth. Devices were also a large factor, including more than $900 million worth of Surfaces — Microsoft’s once left-for-dead tablet line. Surface Pro 3 is selling at twice the rate that the Pro 2 was — and the tablet was profitable for Microsoft last quarter. That’s a big deal, considering Microsoft wrote down nearly $1 billion on excess Surface inventory a couple years ago.