Microsoft's profit rise~

That's expectable. With the new windows genuine advantage validation updates, it's expectable that Microsoft's profit rise.

Microsoft posted a net profit of $2.98 billion, or 29 cents per share, in its fiscal third quarter ended March 31, compared to $2.56 billion, or 23 cents per diluted share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 13 percent to $10.9 billion.

Excluding a 3 cents a share legal charge, Microsoft earned 31 cents per share. Analysts, on average, had forecast earnings per share of 33 cents per share on revenue of $11.04 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

Last month, the company pushed back the retail delivery for the new version of its Windows operating system, Vista, and business software suite Office 2007 until January 2007. Analysts expect PC demand to soften in the coming quarters ahead of the upgrades.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft provided its first outlook for the coming fiscal year starting July 1. It sees diluted earnings per share to range between $1.36 and $1.41 on revenue of $49.5 billion to $50.5 billion next year.

Wall Street analysts called for earnings per share excluding special charges of around $1.53 in fiscal 2007 on sales of $49.5 billion, according to Reuters Estimates. Via Yahoo! News