This was Apple’s week.
Apple’s customers (like me) got a brand-new operating system, cool new MacBook Airs and maybe-not-quite-as-cool-but-whoa-no-optical-drive Mac Minis. Meanwhile, tech and business reporters (like me) got a quarterly earnings report that had some of us (okay, it was me) making jokes about Steve Jobs diving like Scrooge McDuck into a room full of gold Krugerrands.
Microsoft released their quarterly earnings results, too. And they’re almost as huge. Redmond made almost $6 billion in net income on more than $17 billion in revenue. That’s a record quarter — and remember, Microsoft’s been making a lot of money for a long time, in much better economies than this — and a 30% jump in profits from 2010.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting: Microsoft scored its record quarter with mostly flat growth in PC sales — where Windows and Windows Live revenue, its biggest business since forever, actually dropped. Three months where the company didn’t release a significant new product. Three months where the typical Microsoft stories you read at Wired or elsewhere were about things like whether CEO Steve Ballmer should resign.
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