Fact from MS from annual financial analysts meeting
- Microsoft is increasing its research and development funding in fiscal year 2004 by 8 percent.
- Microsoft has shipped 130 million Windows XP licenses; 70 percent are XP Professional Edition.
- PC sales grew 3 percent in the past year, but Microsoft's client business grew 11 percent; overall, Microsoft grew 13 percent year-over-year, thanks largely to Licensing 6.0 and users migrating to XP Pro.
- Microsoft said 350 million PCs still run Windows NT or Windows 9x.
- Windows and Linux are the only server platforms that will grow market share over the next year. Currently, Windows Server owns 53.1 percent of the server market, compared with 16.7 percent for Linux. Next year, the mix will be roughly 53.7 percent to 19.2 percent in Windows' favor. Windows Server sales grew 7.7 percent in fiscal year 2003, compared with 19.2 percent for Linux.
- Today, 37 percent of developers use Microsoft .NET, compared with 34 percent for Java (a year ago the ratio was 25:30). More than 2.5 million developers use .NET technologies.
- Microsoft has sold more than 150 million Microsoft Exchange Server seats worldwide.
- 25 million unique users visit Microsoft Office Online each month. Microsoft has shipped 9.4 million Xboxes; each customer buys an average of 5 software titles for the device, and Xbox Live has more than 500,000 paid subscribers.Microsoft Office System products that aren't part of the core Office suite earn the company more than $1 billion each year. Microsoft Project alone generated $500 million in revenue in the past year. - Microsoft applied for 1500 patents in fiscal year 2003.
- Almost half of the email that goes through Hotmail's servers or 2.4 billion messages every day--is spam; in 2001, it was only 8 percent.
- MSN Messenger is the largest free Instant Messaging (IM) service on the planet, and more than 9 million people are using the service concurrently at any given time.