Some interesting news bits today, skewing pretty heavily to the effects of the pandemic on the tech industry
Microsoft Posts Very Strong Earnings Amid Pandemic
I don’t like talking too much about quarterly earnings from different companies, but the Microsoft earnings were very interesting in several ways. The company had a monster quarter, which was the last quarter of its 2020 fiscal year. Much of the growth was in its enterprise cloud services, which has see huge growth with the large number of people that had to start working from home in the quarter. There was significant growth in the Microsoft 365 product Stack, and Azure also had strong growth, though that growth is slowing over time simply due to the scale it has now released.
Another big source of growth was the Microsoft Surface line of products, which was up 30% year over year. Microsoft did release new hardware products during the quarter, but this shows the trend that PC sales have actually been up this year, fueled by people who suddenly finding themselves needing a new or additional computer in the household. Surface outperformed the PC industry on a percentage basis, and it isn’t clear if this kind of growth is sustainable.
The last big growth vector I found interesting was Xbox services and content, which was up 65% year over year. Services and content would be subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold, as well as Microsoft’s share of revenue from game sales. Again, as more people were stuck spending significantly more time at home, the growth was still staggering. I don’t know if that is sustainable, but Microsoft does have the Xbox Series X launching later this year, which could help keep that momentum.
Twitter Discovering More Compromised Data Following Attack
The fallout from the attack on Twitter from last week continues. The company announced that hackers accessed the direct messages of 36 “high profile” accounts, which includes one current elected official from The Netherlands. Twitter did not specify which accounts had their DM’s accessed, but did say they would be contacting the affected accounts directly.
Twitch Sees a Large Increase in Viewership Amid Pandemic
Amazon owned Twitch livestreaming platform has said that it has seen an explosion in viewership. Total viewership during the period of April to June was up 50% compared to the first quarter of 2020, and up 60% compared to the same time period in 2019. That is a massive increase, and shows the dominance of that platform for live streaming content.
This comes as Twitch is also pushing into other avenues of livestreaming, moving beyond being a gaming focused platformed. It has relaunched and refocused its effort on sports streaming, with an aim of making that the next big expansion for the platform.
Twitch has managed to carve out a very interesting place in internet video. While YouTube is still the dominant platform for video on the internet, Twitch has become the dominant platform for live video. In the long term, live video could be more valuable to advertisers, taking a chunk of out of Google’s ad dominance. This is worth following very closely.
San Diego Comic Con At Home Provides Great Examples of Everything Wrong with Copyright Claims On The Internet
This year’s San Diego Comic Con has, like many events, converted to an online only event for this year. During the Star Trek panel, in which most of the cast of Star Trek Discovery was present, a table read of the script for the first scene of an episode of the show was performed, which included sound effects heard during the actual episode. As this was occurring, automated copyright systems on YouTube marked that as copyrighted material, took down the live stream on copyright grounds. In the message to viewers, it was stated that CBS, the owner of the content, had taken it down due to copyrighted material. Other panels had similar issues.
This shows some of the issues with managing copyright claims on the internet. This panel was obviously not stealing copyrighted content, but it was flagged by an automated system. Creators get hit by this type of automated system on a semi-regular basis, even if the content is not copyrighted. While it is recognized that it is impossible to police a service like YouTube manually, but these systems are not good, and this just highlights some of the flaws.
Intel delays 7nm processors to at least 2022
Here we go again. Intel, a company that was forced to delay the transition from 14nm processors to 10nm processors by years, hampering their product development, and likely one of a number of contributing factors of Apple’s decision to move away from Intel processors, has announced that the transition from 10nm to 7nm has been delayed from 2021 to 2022.
Considering the difficulties Intel had goin from 14nm to 10nm, this is very worrying for the company. Their 10nm processors are still low yield products, and we likely will not see all of Intel’s products transition to 10nm until late 2020.
Intel is in no danger of going out of business, but their continuous issues with the development of processors dating back literally years now is very concerning for a company that can throw billions of dollars at any problem.