Earlier today, Microsoft published its financial results for the first fiscal quarter of 2012, reporting a record revenue of $17.37 billion, a 17% increase year-over-year. Net income for the software giant was listed at $5.74 billion, a 6% increase year-over-year. Nearly all of Microsoft's financial results were above expectations from industry analysts. 

"We had another strong quarter for Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync, and saw growing demand for our public and private cloud services including Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, and Windows Azure,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. "With a great set of consumer products like Windows 7 PCs, Windows Phone 7.5, Xbox and Kinect, we are excited about the holiday buying season.”

Microsoft expects revenues for the second quarter to be between $28.6 billion and $29.2 billion - a large increase as next quarter's results will include Skype.