loading . . . Microsoft Earnings Analysis: FY26 Q1 is All About a Fungible, Planet-Scale Fleet for the AI Bubble ⭐ On Wednesday, Microsoft reported that it earned a net income of $30.8 billion on revenues of $77.7 billion. But its spending on AI, $34.9 billion, was dramatically higher than ever before and it outpaced the company’s profits by a wide margin. And so when I reviewed the post-earnings conference call and studied the company’s earnings call slides, I quickly realized that this analysis would go in an entirely different direction.
That is, instead of looking at Microsoft’s individual businesses, or just focusing on the consumer businesses you and I care about the most, I’m going to look instead at what I feel is the single biggest issue today with Big Tech.
No, it’s not the massive market power that these firms wield, per se. But rather that once these companies achieve a certain scale and become more financially powerful than most countries, their priorities change. And the Microsoft of today is not Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, it’s Amy Hood’s. This is a Microsoft whose primary business is manipulating money. And it is incredibly successful at that, all while harming the products and services it builds, the partners it does business with, and the customers who use those offerings. This is, in short, the enshittification of the U.S. corporation and the U.S. financial system.
You know. A fun topic for a casual read. Sorry.
An utter lack of transparency
One might argue that this is Microsoft not reading the room: I have been complaining about the ongoing transparency reductions in its disclosures to shareholders, investors, and Wall Street every quarter for many years, and this past week, The Wall Street Journal finally took notice, albeit only with regard to the company’s partnership with OpenAI. But that’s not what this is. Instead, we should see this as just the next obvious step in Microsoft seeing what it can get away with in a world in which Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight is literally nonexistent and all of Wall Street is complicit in not calling on Microsoft and other Big Tech firms to meet their legal requirements.
The changes will seem subtle if you don’t follow Microsoft’s earnings as closely as I do. Microsoft updated the template it uses for its PowerPoint-based earnings call slides, which arguably does look more professional but also distracts just enough to trigger a bit of confusion.
At first, I thought I was missing something. But then I realized what it was. Data. The presentation is the same length, 22 pages, as before. It has the same four top-level sections. The fonts are smaller, so there are some screens that actually have more information—clutter, really—on them in a classic example of poor presentation skills. But then I saw it. The Business Highlights page that lists the top-level financial points for each of Microsoft’s three business units is gone. And the useful, non-clutter information provided for each business unit is down.
For example, we pre...
The post Microsoft Earnings Analysis: FY26 Q1 is All About a Fungible, Planet-Scale Fleet for the AI Bubble ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com. http://dlvr.it/TNzF1g
