It’s like 2000 again with the stock price at $35

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Folks were smiling in Redmond today with Microsoft shares up nearly 12 percent, to $35.76 a share. We all feel a little fatter, especially Bill Gates, who grew $2.67 billion richer today after Microsoft trounced analysts' estimates for sales and profit, propelling the shares to their highest level in six years. We haven't seen gains like this since the tech boom in 2000, when the stock was worth almost twice today's price.

 

Apparently we have mostly Windows Vista and Halo 3 to thank for the renewed investor interest, but it’s been a tremendous year for many products:

 

· 88 million copies of Vista have been sold to date;

· Halo 3 generated $330 million in revenue;

· Xbox 360 console unit sales increased 90 percent;

· Windows Server's premium enterprise edition were up 35 percent year-over-year;

· The Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate was downloaded more than one million times in its first month;

· Unit and revenue growth of SQL Server were both up more than 15 percent;

· Client revenues, including those for Vista, are expected to grow 62-64 percent year-over-year in the current fiscal Q2, or 13-14 percent excluding certain revenue deferrals in the prior year;

· Microsoft Business Division revenues, including those for Office, are expected to grow 15-16 percent in Q2 after normalizing for impact of technology guarantees and pre-shipment deferrals in the prior year;

· A beta version of Office Communications Server has been downloaded 80,000 times.

 

For its first quarter, Microsoft reported net income of $4.29 billion, or 45 cents a share, a 23 percent rise compared with a year earlier. Analysts had predicted 39 cents a share. Microsoft reported revenue of $13.76 billion, an increase of 27 percent from a year earlier. The consensus revenue estimate of securities analysts, compiled by Thomson Financial, was just under $12.6 billion.

 

In an interview, Christopher P. Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said the company had “outperformed expectations pretty much across the board,” led by the performance of its personal computer software products. Sales in the Windows group rose 25 percent, to more than $4.14 billion, while the Office division reported a 20 percent increase in sales, to $4.11 billion.