Windows 8 First six months’ sales – A flop show?

Windows 8 First six months’ sales – A flop show?

In the first six months of being in the market, more than a hundred million copies of Windows 8 were sold. The Microsoft disclosure also confirmed that the Windows Blue update(Windows 8.1 it’s officially called now) would be available in the latter part of the year, as a part of the company’s response to the customer feedback it has been flooded with after Windows 8’s release. Other than the number of Windows 8 licenses mentioned, the company also claimed that since the launch, the number of apps in Windows Stores had grown six times. There were  250 million app downloads, with 90% of all apps getting downloaded every month

Microsoft was also picking up users with its cloud services, with an alleged 250 million SkyDrive users, 400 million Outlook.com users, and active Microsoft Accounts running into 700 million. The changeover to Outlook.com from Hotmail has been completed and all users are now using their new email platform weeks ahead of schedule. Microsoft has talked for about the third time on the number of Windows 8 units it has shifted: 40 million copies sold in the 1stmonth, which grew to 60 million after a month. Since then, the pace seems to have slowed down with only 40 million copies being sold in the last 4 months. This is not really so unusual, as in the past, operating systems saw an initial surge in sales and then leveled off.

So is the picture good or bad for Microsoft? Its critics will recall that Windows 7 sales had picked up much quicker, and say that Windows 8 is a failure. Microsoft, however, is upbeat, saying that Windows 8 represents a huge change, and such changes take their time. And actually, the hundred million figure does point to the fact that the PC is not quite dead yet, and actually represents a higher figure than iPad sales in the last quarter, and it is the iPad which is supposed to represent the end of the PC and hence of Windows!

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Apple sees profit decline in Q1 2013 Sales

Does Apple have an Identity Crisis?

Apple Inc is preparing to report its first quarterly earnings decline in a decade, with investors getting increasingly jittery, and a recent plunge in its share price. Investors are nervous about the way Wall Street is valuing the Cupertino company, as though it were a traditional hardware maker only. Certain sections of analysts and investors think that the company should be evaluated as a software hardware hybrid instead. This distinction is critical; if Apple, identified as it is with products like the iPad and iPhone, is seen as primarily a hardware business, it could run aground with changing consumer tastes and tablets and smartphones getting commoditized. That is something that happened to the makers of BlackBerry whose hardware was overtaken by Apple products.

If, instead, Apple is categorized as a hardware-software hybrid, it could be evaluated like software and internet makers which often trade at higher prices. But Wall Street continues to classify Apple, which made a staggering profit of $13 billion in the quarter ended December, as a hardware maker.

Apple is still a highly efficient company at making money, with gross margins of about 40%, roughly double of Dell’s and HP’s. It has characteristics that are very different from other hardware companies; its customers, for instance, very often go in for annual upgrades of their Apple products, which is much more frequent than typical PC four year upgrade cycles of hardware tech businesses, like Dell or HP. Apple’s iTunes and operating system are already everywhere. They have around 500 million App Store accounts and a customer base for selling new services, giving the company a recurring revenue stream in software and services. In the last quarter, Apple earned revenues of $3.7 billion, amounting to 7% of total revenue, from its software and services, and iTunes. But Apple’s woes won’t be over even if Wall Street changes its views on Apple. According to analyst Gene Munster, people loved their Apple products and wanted to buy them, but they had only six months. There had to be something cool coming.

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