Microsoft quietly issued its fiscal year 2025 annual report today, giving investors key insights into the health of the business. I have an alert set up with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) so that I’m notified every time Microsoft produces a regulatory filing. And I thought it might be interesting to view this filing through the lens of the audience I care about, which is individuals, or consumers. 👥 Microsoft’s customers Consumers are just one of Microsoft’s customer groups, of course. It also lists “small and medium organizations, large global enterprises, public-sector institutions, service providers, application developers, and OEMs” [PC/device makers] as customers. I assume consumers are bigger as an audience—by number or revenues—than many of Microsoft’s other customer groups. But even Microsoft acknowledges that recognizing specific contributions to its bottom line is basically impossible because of the size, complexity, and interwoven nature of its various businesses. 📺 How Microsoft reaches those customers Microsoft notes that it sells “commercial and consumer products and services directly to customers,” that these offerings include “cloud services, search, and gaming,” and that distribution is typically through “digital marketplaces and online stores.” Microsoft continues to distribute some products at retail, too, for which it has a network of “independent non-exclusive distributors, authorized replicators, resellers, and retail outlets.” Individual consumers typically obtain these products through retail outlets, and it distributes its own devices, meaning Surface computers and PC peripherals, through third-party retailers. And Microsoft also distributes some products and services through OEMs [PC/device makers] that “pre-install our software on new devices and servers they sell.” On the consumer side, this is primarily Windows and Microsoft 365 consumer, and “the largest component of the OEM business is the Windows operating system pre-installed on devices.” But these OEMs also sell PCs “pre-installed with other Microsoft products and services, including applications such as Office and the capability to subscribe to Microsoft 365 Consumer.” Microsoft obviously advertises to consumers as well, online, in products like Windows, on TV and radio, presumably, and elsewhere. Finding this information in the annual report is a bit tough. But Microsoft spent $26.5 billion on sales and marketing company-wide in FY2025, a sum that accounted for 9 percent of its total revenues. This was an improvement over FY2024, when 10 percent of its revenues were spent on sales and marketing. 🪟 Microsoft’s consumer businesses Microsoft says that it “continues to expand [its] reach with consumers,” but this feels like a soft number. The next sentence, literally, mentions LinkedIn of all things (“now home to 1.2 billion members”), while the firm also notes ... The post Do Consumers Matter to Microsoft At All? ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

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