Microsoft Corp chief financial officer Michael Brown did the honours for the Redmond giant, and his theme was that the company’s new BackOffice Software for Client-Server Computing is very important to its financial results in fiscal 1995: he declined to talk about the first quarter, which the company will report in about 10 days, but one challenge facing the company in 1995 is the saturation of the desktop applications market, he said – Microsoft currently has about an 80% share of the desktop applications software suite market and Brown said revenues from upgrades of the Microsoft Office suite of desktop applications, and other products, will be lower than new products – In terms of another big ramp-up in desktop revenues, we are really going to have to earn it, Brown said; he disappointed the audience by declining to give any estimate on what Microsoft expects to sell in upgrades of its Windows 3.1 software – the follow-on Windows95, is expected sometime in the first half of 1995 – saying that Microsoft’s internal estimates are all over the map; in personal operating systems, Brown said some of the factors affecting performance include installed base growth, the timing of Windows95, and upgrade rates; Microsoft is also interested in continuing its revenue growth in the consumer markets – it is currently is selling more than 50 consumer titles, including Fine Artist and Creative Writer in the children’s market, and multimedia titles such as the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopaedia; the company plans to increase staffing in its Advanced Technology Group, which focuses on ramping up the company onto the information superhighway – it now employs 500 people and has an annual budget of $100m.
