With Apple and Facebook to come later today, Microsoft appears to have set the right tone by blowing through expectations for Q2, boasting a 17% rise in annualised revenue, driven by its Intelligent cloud business which saw a rise in revenues of 23% year-on-year. This outperformance saw quarterly sales rise above $40bn for the first time ever, to $43bn, while profit came in at $15.5bn, a rise of 33%. Microsoft’s web services product Azure, which competes with Amazon’s AWS, saw a particularly impressive performance with a 50% increase in sales. Personal computing also performed well, helped by the move to home working, as well as a new Xbox X product which saw sales of $15.1bn, sending Microsoft shares sharply higher in after-hours trading.