Quarterly operating loss for the segment dropped from $68 million last year to $42 million this year for a decrease of 62 percent while annual loss went from $277 million to $224 million or 24 percent less. The Mobile and Embedded Devices segment includes Pocket PC, SmartPhones, Handheld PC, other Mobility, Windows embedded device operating systems, and MapPoint and accounted for 0.67 percent of the company's total revenue.

For the company as a whole, quarterly revenue was up from $8.07 billion to $9.29 billion while annual revenue rose from $32.19 billion to $36.84 billion, an increase of 14 percent. Net income for fiscal year 2004 was $8.17 billion and diluted earnings per share were $0.75, which included after-tax charges for stock-based compensation expense of $0.35, charges of $0.17 related to the Sun Microsystems settlement, and a fine imposed by the European Commission, and a tax benefit of $0.02.

Reports of embedded market share growth

In a keynote talk at Microsoft's recently held Embedded Developers Conference (DevCon) in San Diego, Tom Adams, General Manager of the Windows CE Platforms group, said that market analyst firms Gartner and VDC have both reported that Microsoft's Windows Embedded OSes attained #1 in market share in the embedded operating system market in 2003, while market analysts IDC and VDC have rated Windows Embedded #1 in revenue for the period 2001 through 2003.

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