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Microsoft still isn’t disclosing the size of its Azure business, providing only the growth rate for the cloud business and leaving investors guessing how its revenue compares to Amazon and Google.

But in its much smaller Dynamics business, which includes software for salespeople, marketers and customer-service agents, Microsoft has suddenly opted for greater transparency.

In its annual report to investors last week, Microsoft disclosed Dynamics revenue in a table alongside other products for the first time.

Dynamics contributed $5.44 billion in revenue in the 2023 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, growing 16% year over year, according to the filing, or double the growth rate of Microsoft as a whole. Dynamics expanded faster than any major product or service offering other than Server Products and Cloud Services, a grouping that contains Azure. It now represents 2.5% of Microsoft’s total revenue, up from 2.2% two years ago, the filing said.

While Dynamics is dramatically smaller than Microsoft’s dominant Office or Windows franchises or the younger Azure business, CEO Satya Nadella has opted to start emphasizing it more. Nadella, who once led a unit that included Dynamics, talked about the progress during the software maker’s earnings call last week.

“Dynamics surpassed $5 billion in revenue over the past fiscal year with our customer experience, service and finance and supply chain businesses, all surpassing $1 billion in annual sales,” Nadella said.

Microsoft’s principal competitor when it comes to Dynamics is Salesforce, whose business is significantly bigger. Technology industry researcher IDC estimates that Salesforce controlled about 23.8% of the market for customer relationship management applications in 2021, more than any other provider, while Microsoft had 5.3%. Both companies had gained share since 2019, while Oracle and SAP lost share, IDC said.

Nadella highlighted the introduction of generative artificial intelligence assistants for the cloud-based Dynamics 365 services. He also noted that Microsoft Sales Copilot, a tool capable of writing business-oriented email drafts, integrates with Dynamics as well as Salesforce’s software.

Partly motivated by Microsoft’s AI capabilities, some companies are switching to Dynamics from Salesforce, said Manny Medina, CEO of sales software startup Outreach. Dynamics can cost less money, and the underlying technology has improved, Medina told CNBC in an interview, adding that the growth is likely to continue.

“I’m seeing more requests to integrate into Dynamics, and more of my customers asking me to bring some of the things I have for Salesforce to carry over into Dynamics,” Medina said. “I’ve seen a spike in the last year.” Some of the momentum Outreach is seeing could be because the company began moving upmarket last year to serve larger companies, he said.

Meanwhile, Salesforce has hit some speed bumps in the past year. Bret Taylor, who briefly served alongside Marc Benioff as co-CEO, left in a surprise move. Revenue growth slowed at the company and activist investors announced ownership stakes. Salesforce responded by widening its adjusted operating margin earlier than planned and managed to avoid a proxy fight.

“Salesforce customer satisfaction numbers are at a record high and consistently trend above industry standards,” a Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “Industry analysts continually rank Salesforce ahead of MSFT in all categories related to Dynamics.”

The spokesperson said elements of generative AI, which creates realistic text in response to human input after being trained on large data sets, are available in the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products, and they’re being tested in Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, the Salesforce Platform and Slack.

As a brand, Dynamics predates Salesforce. It began in 1993, when North Dakota-based Great Plains Software released client-server financial management software for medium-sized businesses. Great Plains went public in 1997, and Microsoft bought the company for $1.1 billion in 2001. Doug Burgum, who was CEO of Great Plains at the time, is now North Dakota’s Republican governor and a candidate for president.

Microsoft isn’t just pushing Dynamics to investors. The company has been more aggressive in selling the product this year, said Adam Mansfield, a practice lead at consulting firm UpperEdge, which helps companies negotiate with software vendors. He said Microsoft is offering subsidies to prospective customers who are already committed to Salesforce, and Microsoft is more willing to help clients with the costs of consulting services to assist with implementation.

“Microsoft is pretty much coming in and going, ‘We’ll make it as cheap as you want,'” Mansfield said.

Microsoft declined to comment on pricing.

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Meet Partiful, the Gen Z party-planning staple that’s taking on Apple

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Meet Partiful, the Gen Z party-planning staple that's taking on Apple

Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao

Courtesy: Partiful

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”

The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.

Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.

The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.

Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.

Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.

Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.

What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.

“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.

For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.

It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.

Sample invitations from the Partiful app

Source: Partiful

Bringing people together in real life

Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech. 

Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”

“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”

Meta declined to comment.

Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.

“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.

She and Tao took the leap.

With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users. 

Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaking Gen Z’s language

What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.

Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.

Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.

Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.

“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”

For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.

As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.

Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Partiful is free, at least for now.

Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.

That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.

For now, Partiful remains confident.

“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.

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How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

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How quantum could supercharge Google’s AI ambitions

Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company’s most ambitious bets yet. They’re attempting to develop the world’s most advanced quantum computers.

“In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth,” said Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum AI.

Google has been viewed by many as late to the generative AI boom, because OpenAI broke into the mainstream first with ChatGPT in late 2022.

Late last year, Google made clear that it wouldn’t be caught on the backfoot again. The company unveiled a breakthrough quantum computing chip called Willow, which it says can solve a benchmark problem unimaginably faster than what’s possible with a classical computer, and demonstrated that adding more quantum bits to the chip reduced errors exponentially. 

“That’s a milestone for the field,” said John Preskill, director of the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. “We’ve been wanting to see that for quite a while.”

Willow may now give Google a chance to take the lead in the next technological era. It also could be a way to turn research into a commercial opportunity, especially as AI hits a data wall. Leading AI models are running out of high-quality data to train on after already scraping much of the data on the internet.

“One of the potential applications that you can think of for a quantum computer is generating new and novel data,” said Kelly. 

He uses the example of AlphaFold, an AI model developed by Google DeepMind that helps scientists study protein structures. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 

“[AlphaFold] trains on data that’s informed by quantum mechanics, but that’s actually not that common,” said Kelly. “So a thing that a quantum computer could do is generate data that AI could then be trained on in order to give it a little more information about how quantum mechanics works.” 

Kelly has said that he believes Google is only about five years away from a breakout, practical application that can only be solved on a quantum computer. But for Google to win the next big platform shift, it would have to turn a breakthrough into a business. 

Watch the video to learn more.

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Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

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Nintendo Switch 2 retail preorder to begin April 24 following tariff delays

An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025. 

Isabel Infantes | Reuters

Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.

Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.

Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.

Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.

“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”

The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.

However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”

It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.

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