Source: Gearlog

Microsoft announced its earnings report yesterday.
The company announced revenue of $15.06 billion a 9% increase over the same period of the prior year.

"Our customers are asking how they can save money and do more with less," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. "Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help our customers save money through supplier consolidation, increased productivity, and a low total cost of ownership through the depth and breadth of our product portfolio and solutions."
The earnings certainly didn’t disappoint investors and reassured the industry that global IT spending hasn’t halted as many have feared.

Chris Liddell, chief financial officer of Microsoft noted that "we feel extremely good about our relative competitive position and our ability to continue outgrowing IT spend. We believe our exceptionally strong cash flow, product pipeline and financial strength will allow us to weather economic conditions well."

In a report on the earnings the company detailed some "forward-looking statements". These are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. One of the statements was "delays in product development and related product release schedules", we all hope there won’t be any delays hitting Windows 7 as the company starts to unveil its plans for the next generation Windows OS next week.

Microsoft announced the earnings at 5:30pm ET yesterday, an hour and a half after the NASDAQ closed for market hours. After-market trading has the stock price down just over 6% at the time of writing.

Microsoft announced the availability of a critical security patch yesterday affecting a variety of Windows operating systems.

Interestingly, the Windows 7 pre-beta build, which will be available to developers next Tuesday, also contains the bug. Microsoft stated "Customers running Windows 7 Pre-Beta are encouraged to download and apply the update to their systems. On Windows 7 Pre-Beta systems, the vulnerable code path is only accessible to authenticated users. This vulnerability is not liable to be triggered if the attacker is not authenticated, and therefore would be rated Important."

In a support article Microsoft details some Windows 7 Pre-Beta file information notes. The build string on the notes is 6.1.6801.4106, the same build string that has been screenshotted recently.

It is believed that the 6801 build is a milestone 3 (M3) build released to select customers and partners over the last few months.

Microsoft will be releasing the build to attendees at their professional developers conference next Tuesday.