Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte

Feb 5th 2025

Windows Weekly 918

Casa Chaos

Hosted by Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott

FY25 Q2 earnings, reasoning models, deprecation

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Category: News

Microsoft reported that it earned a net income of $24.1 billion on revenues of $69.6 billion in the quarter ending December 31, the second quarter of its fiscal 2025. Those figures represent gains of 10 percent and 12 percent year-over-year (YOY), respectively.

Microsoft Earnings Overview

  • Not much going on with client-side products and services, so a focus on AI
  • Productivity and Business Processes: $29.4 billion in revenues, up 14 percent YOY. This was 42.2 percent of Microsoft’s earnings
  • Intelligent Cloud: $25.5 billion in revenues, up 19 percent YOY. This was 36.6 percent of Microsoft’s earnings
  • More Personal Computing: $14.7 billion, unchanged from the year-ago quarter. (Literally flat YOY.) This was 21.1 percent of Microsoft’s earnings
  •  

Windows

  • Microsoft testing AI-powered search in Windows 11 Dev
  • New Canary build-  Windows Midi Services preview, OneDrive resume,  File Explorer folder resume
  • Microsoft is experimenting with new Windows 11 UIs
  • Microsoft Edge text rendering comes to all Chromium web browsers on Windows - That only took a few years
  • Microsoft explains deprecation after using the term for decades

AI

  • Week 2 of submitting to our new Chinese overlords
  • Gemini catapults into the lead for a few days as Gemini 2.0 becomes broadly available
  • Inspired by DeepSeek, OpenAI releases reasoning model to free ChatGPT
  • This comes after Microsoft added it to Copilot
  • Reasoning vs. traditional models
  • Also, DeepSeek R1 is on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub
  • Sam Altman discusses DeepSeek, more
  • OpenAI offers up an AI research assistant

More Earnings (Lightning Round)

  • Intel - $14.3 billion in revenues, down 7 percent
  • AMD: Revenues up 24 percent, market share gains on Intel
  • Apple - Record $124.2 billion in revenues, up 4 percent
  • Alphabet/Google: Revenues at $96.47 billion, up 12 percent - CapEx expenditures closing in on MSFT
  • Samsung - Revenues up 12 percent to $52.2 billion
  • Spotify is profitable for full year for the first time

Microsoft 365

  • Designer makes its way to Photos (Windows) and Microsoft 365 Copilot app (mobile)
  • Microsoft is removing the VPN from Microsoft 365 Family and Personal
  • Outlook for Mac to get email recall feature

Xbox

  • Starfield is coming to Game Pass Standard this month, more Game Pass titles
  • Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PS5
  • Two Age of Empires titles are coming to PS5
  • Remember that Microsoft partnership with Start.gg? Me neither
  • Nintendo revenues, Switch sales fall more than expected, will no longer beat DS this fiscal year

Tips and Picks

  • Tip of the week: It’s time for an online account audit
  • App pick of the week: Another week of big browser update
  • RunAs Radio this week: Entra ID Protection with Corissa Koopmans
  • Margarita of the week: 2 oz white tequila, 1.5 oz Triple Sec, 1 oz fresh lime juice.

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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