Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)’s Fiscal Year 2015 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call Transcript

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Raimo: Perfect and quick follow up for Amy. If you look at the changes on the operating side that you’re talking about, it obviously seems that the cultural shift it it’s more dynamic budgeting. It is very much a return based culture that you seem to be introducing here but it’s something that needs to feed through the organization and it’s more cultural change. Where are you in terms of having that fully through the organization?

Amy: Thanks for that question. I think we talked about this in prior quarters. While many people want to see it as a finesse concept, it’s not. It’s a senior leadership team concept and a leadership environment that I think we’re making collective decisions faster, I think we’re applying our recourses to opportunities when we see them, I think we have the freedom to make those choices quickly and I feel very good both about the decisiveness that comes with it but also the empowerment that we give people in our organization to make those calls to increase our performance without waiting to an annual budget process. I think some people call it dynamic budgeting. For us, I think it’s more about thinking about the opportunities we have and stack ranking those every day to improve our execution and our returns.

Chris: Thanks. We’ll move to the next question please.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brendon Barnicle with Pacific Crest Securities.  Please Proceed.

Brendon: Thanks so much. Amy, when we first started talking about Office 365, I think at that time that you were suggesting that the move from an office cal to an office 365 license would increase growth profit by about 50%. Now that you’ve had a couple quarters with Office 365 do you think that the changes to the model still make sense. More importantly, are there other changes that you’re seeing that are more accurate?

Amy: Thanks for the question. In general, I think we’re still on the early ends of seeing the opportunity that we have in that segment. As you point out, there are a couple components that make gross profit dollars per seat or the lifetime value of a customer depending on the terms you want to use improve and increase over the life cycle. The very first think, and I think Satya even mentioned it, and its most direct in SNB, is moving to buying a copy of Office, which was a very static concept, to the idea where you can buy Office and frankly get all the benefit that those used to deploy servers used to get only with IT departments of their own. When you move Office, it’s simply the first step so even though it comes with a lower growth margin percentage, our abilities to add workloads, to add premium services and to increase our overall footprint inside a customer is really where the lifetime value goes up and frankly over time in watching the creativity and the pace of innovation we’ve seen coming out of our engineering teams particularly in Azure and Office 365 and our CRM Team online, I actually even have more confidence in our ability to attach and grow that growth profit over time. We mentioned simply one that didn’t exist. I think Brendon when we first started having this conversation, which was our EMS suite, and I look and say those opportunities as well as the creativity of our people I think gives me more confidence, not less, in the structural integrity of the lifetime value of a customer argument.

Chris: Thanks. Operator we’ll have time for one last question please.

Operator: Our last question comes from the line of Ed McGuire from CLSA. Please proceed.

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