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You are misreading the punchline of that Article. It says $1B in Sales, not $1B in revenue. There's nothing in that article that says that's revenue, only sales. There's also nothing in that article that says it doesn't include comped hours.

Believe me, if Azure had $1B in revenue, Microsoft would not be quiet about it. The keyword "Sales" is there for a reason.

*Edit: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." from the article. This is definitely not just instance time they're talking about.



Excuse the ignorance, but what am I missing here? Don't all sales qualify as revenue?

Edit: quote from the article: > “I expect them to double annually from here,” Staten said of Microsoft’s Azure revenue.

Seems to at least imply sales and revenue are interchangeable in this context.


You know what. I read that Bloomberg article multiple times and I've never seen it anywhere else on the Internet. As I googled to make sure I wasn't making a grave error, the term "Azure $1B Revenue" has quite a few hits.

I must gracefully admit my error here. It's possible that they're counting comped time on the system as revenue, but it's much more unlikely if they're using the term revenue in public.

Edit: The only leg I have to stand on is the comment about the cost of software being included in Azure revenue. That's smelly accounting IMHO, but maybe I'm missing a detail.


I work at MSFT in the Azure division. I have no idea about the specifics of accounting terminology, but from what I hear internally I can say that we're quite pleased with both the absolute numbers and the projected growth. It's understandable that our cloud isn't as prominent in the minds of the HN crowd as some of the other well-known ones, but we actually do have the kind of customer base to make the public numbers credible.


Thanks very much for the contribution to the discussion. I appreciate the insight.

When they talk about software being counted as part of the billing do you have any idea what they might mean? I believe it was described as software to build applications in Azure.


You may have heard about the reorganization the other day, I think we're now called "Server and Cloud". Perhaps they may be referring to systems such as Azure Active Directory and Message Service Bus? There's a lot more going on than a simple PaaS VM and web hosting. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh967619.aspx http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/messaging/


Dude, sales is revenue. Maybe you're thinking of net earnings or profit?


Thanks for this comment. For a moment, I didn't understand basic economics terms.




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