Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, revealed his vision for the metaverse at the company’s Q2 2022 earnings call.
Overall, the company’s Q2 2022 filing showed a significant increase in cloud-based services. Microsoft reported $51.7 billion in revenue, a 20% increase over the previous year. Intelligent Cloud revenue was $18.3 billion, a 26 percent increase over the previous year. Azure drove a 29 percent increase in sales for server goods and cloud services. As well as a 46 percent increase in revenue for other cloud services.
Among the trends noted by Nadella on the earnings call was a “structural shift in PC demand.”
According to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, Windows revenue from PC manufacturers increased by 25%, which was “far over expectations”. She stated that demand was being driven by the PC market’s success, particularly in the commercial category.
According to an earnings call transcript obtained on the financial blog site Seeking Alpha, Nadella envisions the metaverse as the next wave of the Internet. “Just as the initial wave of the Internet has allowed anyone to construct a website, I believe the next wave of the Internet will be a more open world where people, whether companies, game developers, or anyone else, may create their own metaverse world,” he stated.
“The first place we see this is the increasing digitization of people, places, and things to truly enable organizations automate operations at the next level,” he explained. “So, today, we have a number of examples of customers engaging with us through Azure IoT, Digital Twins, and Mesh. So that’s what you’ll see in Azure, and we’re investing heavily on it.”
Nadella sees prospects for Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces further up the software stack. This in-development technology is to control physical operations in physical areas such as a store, a connected factory, or a building. “We now have a suite that powers entirely by connected spaces,” he explained. Microsoft’s goal, he noted, is to automate physical operations.
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