Sales of Kinect for the Xbox and Office 2010 helped boost Microsoft revenue by 15 percent last quarter, the company announced Thursday.
Revenue landed at $19.95 billion. That’s up from $19 billion from the same time period last year, though that $19 billion figure included $1.71 billion in deferred revenue from the Windows 7 Upgrade Option program and Windows 7 pre-orders. As a result, revenue was up 15 percent year-over-year without that deferment, Microsoft said.
Profit came in at $6.63 billion, down slightly from last year’s $6.66 billion.
The big winner last year was Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, which grew 55 percent thanks to the Kinect, which also helped boost sales of the Xbox 360 consoles, Xbox Live subscriptions, and Xbox games. At this year’s CES, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft sold 8 million Kinect devices in its first 60 days on the market.
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The company’s business division also grew 24 percent last year, buoyed by the release of Office 2010, which made its debut in June.
Office 2010 is the fastest-selling consumer version of Office in history, Microsoft said. License sales are more than 50 percent ahead of what Office 2007 achieved in the same time period.
“Office had a huge quarter, exceeding everyone’s expectations, and our roadmap for cloud productivity with Office 365 makes products like SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics CRM even more attractive to our customers,” Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Microsoft also announced that it has now sold more than 300 million Windows 7 licenses. “To put that in perspective, 300 million is roughly the combined number of households in North American and in Europe! Or, to put it another way, if you lined up 300 million Windows 7 product boxes, they would stretch nearly 1.5 times around the Earth,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
At this point, more than 20 percent of Internet-connected PCs are running Windows 7, according to Net Applications.
Earlier this week, Microsoft said it has now sold 2 million Windows Phone 7 devices, though those sales are to OEMs; Microsoft did not break out consumer sales. Instead it focused on user satisfaction and a growing developer community, a theme it reiterated during its earnings call.
Microsoft is “encouraged” by Windows Phone 7 sales, but “we realize we still have a lot of work ahead of us and we remain focused and committed to the long-term success of Windows Phone 7,” the company said. Microsoft said it will soon add new features to the OS, as well as support for CDMA phones, which includes Verizon.