TECH NEWS – The Redmond folks aren’t making much money from Windows (but they have Office365… while we use Office offline), and they don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Microsoft saw a 39% drop in Windows OEM sales in the previous quarter. (OEM refers to Windows pre-installed on PCs, such as Dell and HP machines.) It means they simply didn’t sell as many new PCs (because there’s no way many people would have switched to Linux instead of Windows 11). The poor performance is also backed up by Canalys, a market analyst firm, which reports that manufacturers shipped 29% fewer PCs in the last quarter of 2022, a 16% drop from a strong year in 2021. Although it is higher than in 2019, the market is still on a downward trend. New product launch “challenges” have also seen Microsoft’s PC devices, such as Surface laptops, down 39%, even though they launched the new Surface devices in October. Microsoft expects a further decline of around 30% in Windows OEM sales in the current quarter.

The Verge reported what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a conference call with investors: Windows usage is still higher than it was before the pandemic (10% more time per PC on average), and in October, Xbox boss Phil Spencer also praised the PC because he said the growth of Xbox Game Pass was on that platform (he said then that there was a 130-140% year-on-year in PC subscriptions).

The cloud sector is soaring, with $27.1 billion more revenue from Microsoft Cloud, which has brought the company a positive balance sheet. It’s no wonder the company has lined up behind ChatGPT, as Nadella believes the next big wave of computing is on the way, and Microsoft Cloud will transform one of the world’s most advanced AI models into a new computing platform. The growing Game Pass subscriber base could partly offset the 13% decline in the video game sector, and Microsoft expects continued growth here. Still, it will not compensate for the low hourly monetization in internal and external (first/third-party) content…

Source: PCGamer