Thankfully for Microsoft, it’s working out okay.

Posting financials after market close Thursday, the company reported fiscal second-quarter earnings of 76 cents a share, on $21.46 billion in revenue. Analysts, on average, had expected the company to report earnings of 75 cents a share on $21.6 billion in revenue.

So revenue roughly in line with consensus, and a beat on the bottom line by a penny. Not bad, considering what we’ve been hearing lately about Surface sales and the PC market.

Breaking Microsoft’s earnings down by division, there was good news and bad. The company’s Windows Division posted revenue of $5.88 billion, a 24 percent increase from the prior-year period. Its Server & Tools business reported $5.19 billion of revenue, a 9 percent increase year over year. Revenue at Microsoft’s Online Services division was also up at $869 million, an 11 percent increase from the year prior.

Revenue was down at both Microsoft’s Business and Entertainment and Devices divisions, though. The former posted $5.69 billion in revenue, down 10 percent year over year; the latter posted revenue of $3.77 billion, down 11 percent.

“Our big, bold ambition to reimagine Windows as well as launch Surface and Windows Phone 8 has sparked growing enthusiasm with our customers and unprecedented opportunity and creativity with our partners and developers,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

That’s great. But we’ll have to take his word for it for the time being. Microsoft’s earnings release contains absolutely no mention of Surface sales and no details about how Windows Phone 8 is doing.

Notes from the earnings call …

• Microsoft CFO Peter Klein says the number of apps in the Windows store has quadrupled.
• Total revenue for Windows grew 11 percent during the quarter.
• “We think of Surface as one part of the overall Windows story. … This quarter, it was a contributing factor for the revenue growth in the Windows business. It obviously had some limited distribution this quarter. Our goal is to continue to build out that business. We’re going to expand the product lineup and retail distribution and capacity.”
• “We learned a lot about Windows 8 this quarter, a lot about the types of experiences and price points customers are looking for. We saw great demand for some of the touch devices, and in some cases we didn’t have the supply. I think we learned what we always suspected, there’s quite a bit of segmentation and differentiation.”

Evernote Business for Mac

The company just announced that it will launch a premium, business-oriented version of its popular personal-productivity app, which claims more than 45 million worldwide users to date.

The new business app offers users the ability to create notes, spreadsheets, task lists, presentations and mock-ups, all of which can be shared with colleagues. Users can share Business Notebooks with colleagues, and can still maintain Personal Notebooks, which are private.

The service costs $10 per user per month, and includes two gigabytes per month of content storage in Personal Notebooks, while co-workers get the same amount of content storage in Business Notebooks.

Evernote Business apps for Android and Windows desktop went live this morning. The Mac desktop app is coming “shortly,” and Evernote is still waiting on approval from Apple for the iOS app. A representative for the company says a Windows 8-compatible app is also forthcoming, but declined to say exactly when. (The original Evernote app for Metro launched with a pared-down features list, and for some users, syncing it with Windows 8 has proved challenging.)

Evernote Business for Windows

Given Evernote’s focus on organization and productivity, an official business app seems to be a natural offshoot of the free consumer app — one that competes more and more with Microsoft’s OneNote app for Office users.

During the announcement made today at the LeWeb tech conference in Paris, Evernote CEO Phil Libin said that two-thirds of the app’s users already rely on Evernote for business. Fifteen percent of those users get it issued to them from work, while 85 percent bring it into a professional environment without it being official work software.

He also noted that a large number of users come from Japan, where 40 books have been written about the application.

Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

Collaboration tools are all the rage in office applications these days, and they come in many forms. There are platforms through which one can share and collaborate on many kinds of files. Box comes to mind. Then there are the cloud applications like Salesforce.com and Workday, all of which are collaborative. Social enterprise apps like Jive and Yammer are built expressly to encourage collaboration. Google Apps has recreated a solid set of core office applications, all accessible directly from a browser, and all of them allow multiple editors on documents.

Smartsheet is essentially a spreadsheet application that’s built for the age of the cloud. Entire sheets can be shared with colleagues, or you can share only granular bits of data, like the contents of a particular row. Sheets can be published to the Web, and are also accessible via mobile apps on iOS and Android. It integrates with Box, Salesforce, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services.

So far, it has a million customers, including companies as varied as ESPN, MetLife and Toshiba. Many of those just found Smartsheet and started using it for a particular project or task, and its use grew virally within those companies. One of them was Insight Venture Partners. And, of course, you know where this is going. In a moment worthy of a Victor Kiam, they liked it so much they’ve bought a piece of the company.

Insight announced today that it has led a $26 million investment in Smartsheet, along with Madrona Venture Partners. Ryan Hinkle, a principal at Insight, will join Smartsheet’s board of directors. The funding will go toward accelerating sales and marketing, and to kick software development efforts up a notch or two.

While it is one of the largest consumer electronics and mobile companies in the world, Korea’s Samsung has a relatively quiet profile in Silicon Valley.

In fact, while it has had a longtime facility in San Jose for two decades, its execs are not well known to many except the top echelons of the tech sector here and Samsung’s interactions with the entrepreneurial culture have been decidedly low key.

No longer, it seems.

Besides a previously announced new 8.5-acre campus in Mountain View for its U.S. research and development center, slated for completion in 2014, sources said the company is close to signing a deal for a prominent venue in downtown Palo Alto that will house a start-up accelerator.

The location that the company is now negotiating is the second floor of the former Borders Books space on University Avenue. The historical property has a splashy movie marquee, since it used to house the Varsity Theatre.

It’s not quite Oppa Gangnam Style, it is a big move for Samsung.

While it is unclear if the new office will focus on making investments in start-ups or incubating its own innovation, sources said it will be aimed at linking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other players more closely with Samsung.

Sources said the move is being spearheaded by a relatively new hire by Samsung: David Eun, who became its EVP to lead a new push to create more media offerings in December. Previous to Samsung, Eun has been an exec at both Google and AOL.

Eun is well known in the Valley already, but a new location that will focus Samsung’s digital efforts should raise the company’s profile with the digerati here.

Also on the docket to do that is Samsung’s other new major facility. In September, right in the middle of its high-profile patent trial with Apple, the company announced that Samsung Information Systems America, its U.S. R&D Center, would expand and relocate to a new campus.

“The R&D Center will provide a state-of-the-art campus that can support the current rapid growth in the organization, and also provide the infrastructure to support Samsung’s open innovation and university collaboration activities,” Samsung said in a press release at the time. “Construction is anticipated to start in the second half of 2013 on the company’s two new six-story class-A office buildings totaling approximately 385,000 sq. ft. and two 5-6 story parking structures, with occupancy expected in 2014.”

In other words, Apple: Samsung is now officially in the house in Silicon Valley.

The move comes less than a month after Sinofsky presided over the launch of Windows 8 and Microsoft’s Surface tablet — products seen as key to the future if the PC software pioneer is to retain its position in a market increasingly dominated by phones and tablets.

Sources have said the move came amid growing tension between Sinofsky and other top executives. Sinofsky, though seen as highly talented, was viewed at the top levels as not the kind of team player that the company was looking for. The move is likened by some to the recent ouster at Apple of iOS head Scott Forstall.

Officially, Microsoft is saying that the move was a mutual decision by Sinofsky and the company.

Microsoft is dividing Windows oversight among two top Sinofsky deputies. Julie Larson-Green will head up the engineering side of Windows, while Tami Reller, who has headed marketing and served as the unit’s CFO, will have responsibility for the business side of things. Both will report to CEO Steve Ballmer.

Sinfosky, who took the reins of Windows in 2006 after a long career in the Office unit, helped restore order and discipline to the operating system following the boondoggle of Windows Vista. In the wake of that widely-panned release, Sinofsky spearheaded the development of the largely praised Windows 7 release before turning his attention to Windows 8 — a far more radical overhaul of the software.

However, he was a divisive figure both inside and outside of the Windows group.

Update: In a press release, Ballmer praised Steven’s work, but also talked about a need for “more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings.”

“I am grateful for the many years of work that Steven has contributed to the company,” CEO Steve Ballmer said. “The products and services we have delivered to the market in the past few months mark the launch of a new era at Microsoft. We’ve built an incredible foundation with new releases of Microsoft Office, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Microsoft Surface, Windows Server 2012 and ‘Halo 4,’ and great integration of services such as Bing, Skype and Xbox across all our products. To continue this success it is imperative that we continue to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings.”

Sinofsky, praised the company in the statement.

“It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft,” Sinofsky said. “I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.”

However, coming up with the right business model while balancing all of the company’s many objectives — now, that’s the tricky part.

And that, more than anything else, explains the long wait for Office on iOS and Android.

Here are three key factors Redmond is trying to balance:

• Microsoft is coming from behind in the phone and tablet space, and has touted Office support as a key selling point for Windows Phone and Surface.
• Office needs to remain relevant, and doing so means being on all of the devices its users are running.
• Office, along with Windows, remains a key profit maker for Microsoft and one of the main financial engines it needs to compete in other areas, including search and mobile devices.

It appears that Microsoft has settled on a strategy designed to balance all these objectives. According to a report by The Verge, it will require an Office 365 subscription to edit Office documents on iOS and Android. That means that it would continue to make money from Office, and Surface and Windows Phone devices would still have the advantage of full Office bundled in.

Office 365, introduced in recent years, is Microsoft’s effort to shift Office from a traditional packaged software product into a service that can run on multiple devices and operate as a subscription service.

As for its Android and iOS plans, Microsoft has issued a number of statements, some contradictory, but the company essentially indicated that, yes, Office is coming to Android and iOS at some point.

A Czech statement indicated that Office for iOS and Android would come early next year.

Microsoft’s U.S. operations were less definitive.

“As we shared previously, Office Mobile will work across Windows Phones, Android phones and iOS, and we have nothing additional to announce today about retail availability of the new Office,” Microsoft said in a statement.

It’s not totally clear, though, when Microsoft shared this or which apps it plans to bring to rival mobile devices.

The only mainstay Office program released so far for iOS and Android is the OneNote note-taking application, along with an app supporting Microsoft’s Lync unified communications.

Microsoft has released a number of other products for iOS and Android and has been actively exploring for some time whether to release its flagship Office apps for Apple’s mobile devices.

It’s a tricky balance for a company trying to use Office to help differentiate Windows Phone while at the same time making sure that the productivity suite remains ubiquitous in a world in which business is done on far more than just PCs and Macs.

It is clear that the Czechs said more than Microsoft was interested in saying, but it is unclear what they said that was incorrect as opposed to premature, and Microsoft declined to elaborate.

“The information shared by our Czech subsidiary is not accurate,” Microsoft said. “We do not have anything further to share at this time.”

On Friday, I began a series about the various and sundry things new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was up to at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

First up was a look at how she is zeroing in on improving its troubled search efforts and advertising platforms, two business arenas that will get more focus this week when Mayer unveils her plans to the employees of Yahoo at an all-hands meeting.

According to an internal memo Mayer sent out Friday, the confab is scheduled for Tuesday. It comes after two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week, in which Mayer outlined the plans for she has come up with to turnaround the company.

[Special note to readers: I would, as usual, embed the entire memo below, but Yahoo's top execs -- most especially, newly installed general counsel Ron "Leaks Are 'Uncool'" Bell -- have worked themselves into quite a lather over the issue of late. Apparently, according to numerous sources, the company is using all kinds of leak-catching tech tools -- free smartphones aren't as free as you might think, if you catch my drift, Yahoos, and I would also advise turning up the music loud when whispering in the Sunnyvale HQ offices -- so I will only quote internal emails only in part going forward to thwart such silliness.]

Pressing on!

In the memo, titled “Board slides, strategy and goals,” Mayer talked about the meetings. There will be two this Tuesday, one in the morning and one later in the day, in order to accommodate Yahoo staffers internationally.

“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.

“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.

Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)

Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.

That’s a good idea, of course, because tracking such things has not been a focus of Yahoo for a while now. Not surprisingly, it is very much a practice at Google, from whence Mayer came and where she has been liberally borrowing a wide variety of management concepts.

But she has a few of her own tricks up her sleeve too, according to many sources, in terms of the strategy.

As I previously wrote, Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

It’s all based around learning technology that Yahoo has been working on called CORE, or Content Optimization and Relevance Engine. There will be lots of linking out and an attempt to make Yahoo more of a platform for others to develop on top of.

It’s a little Facebook-like, said several sources, but more focused on content and other products that differentiate Yahoo. Mayer has decided to back 10 key arenas, such as its powerful Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports sites, as well as its Flickr photo offering.

Still, no redesign is set in stone yet, so we’ll see what Mayer has decided on.

It’s also not clear what the e-commerce focus will be, but it is also an area that Mayer has a lot of experience in. Also a big question: What the heck is Yahoo’s non-existent mobile strategy going to be?

In addition, Mayer has already ordered the removal of some ads from both Yahoo’s email service and also its home page, cutting them back to improve the consumer experience. That’s a dicey move since Yahoo makes a big chunk of change from those ads, especially on the home page.

No matter. “Everything she is doing is about the consumer experience,” said a source. “Nothing else matters to her, even if it might matter to the bottom line.”

So far, Wall Street has been wary of Mayer until they see a strategy — the stock has been sitting in the $15 range since she arrived. That said, the high-profile exec does have more leeway from investors, and — perhaps most importantly — from the board.

In fact, at her now weekly Friday meeting for employees, a big group of the directors appeared onstage in a show of support.

A purple show, apparently — all were wearing lavender Yahoo t-shirts with “BoD” stamped on them.

Awwwwww! It’s like a mostly all-boy band! One, by the way, that might get more members soon. Sources told me that director Dan Loeb has been on the hunt to add at least one more person to the group, focusing on landing a Silicon Valley star.

When he was waging his proxy battle on Yahoo he tried to recruit both SurveyMonkey and former Yahoo David Goldberg and also well-known entrepreneur Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide.

While Goldberg joining the Yahoo board is not happening — he just joined the board of the Washington Post — getting Levchin to sign on seems more likely, especially with the focus on attracting innovative talent to the company.

Levchin is definitely that, as are many others Loeb has apparently been trying to buttonhole of late.

More on talent in our next episode.

I’ve become a 100% user of Google Docs and use my computer only for browsing, email and cloud applications. I read your column recommending laptops, but was wondering what you might recommend for someone like me.

A:

Assuming you are looking for a laptop rather than a tablet, the least expensive and best configured machine for your needs is likely a Google-developed Chromebook, built by either Acer or Samsung. Information about them is at http://bit.ly/TbdhlW. I reviewed the latest version of the Chrome OS, which powers the Chromebook, in June. You can find the review at http://dthin.gs/Lvc8mg. I rated it as inferior to Windows or the Mac operating system, mainly because those platforms can run many more programs. But given your needs, the Chromebook might have been designed for you.

Q:

I was wondering if Google’s Nexus 7 tablet allows the user to edit documents in Google Drive instead of just viewing them, as on the Google Drive iPad app.

A:

As far as I know, the Android Google Drive app runs the same on the Nexus 7 as on other Android tablets. It does allow you to edit documents in Google’s own formats. But if you try to edit a Microsoft Office document, the app sends you to an Office-compatible app, if you have one. On the iPad, the Google Drive app lacks built-in editing, even for apps in Google’s formats. But it can send you directly to Google Docs in the Web browser to edit documents in Google formats. If you want to edit those in Microsoft formats, the app, as on Android, sends you to another, Office-compatible app.

Q:

I use Microsoft SkyDrive because I’m grandfathered with 25 GB of free storage. I have not seen evidence that the sync of files from my hard drive to SkyDrive works, so I upload manually. Is there something I need to do to make this automatic?

A:

It has always worked well for me, and yours is the first email I’ve received about this problem. I assume you have installed the SkyDrive app and that you are placing the files you want to sync in the special SkyDrive folder it creates. If you are and it isn’t working, I suggest you delete the program and then download and install a new copy. Also, Microsoft has a help site at: http://bit.ly/MYB6YH that includes a troubleshooting section.

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Google-developed Chromebooks are currently built by Asus and Samsung.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

According to multiple reports I have received, some employees of OnLive have been walking out of their Palo Alto, Calif. offices over the last few hours laden with boxes.

And some, no surprise, are headed to a nearby bar — The Patio — presumably to drown their sorrows.

The departures from the online cloud-gaming service came after a meeting this morning in which its top execs told staff that it would be letting almost the entire staff go, but without a lot of explanation of what that meant.

While founder and CEO Steve Perlman runs a number of other digital efforts — via his own Rearden Labs — at its Silicon Valley HQ, sources said only fraction of staffers will be left to keep the servers running until a resolution for the assets is found. Kotaku reported that OnLive would be filing an “alternative to bankruptcy called an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, or ABC, in the state of California.”

It is not clear who actually owns the pricey technology and patents for OnLive, which has raised $56 million in funding from investors such as Maverick Capital, Time Warner and HTC. HTC, the Taiwanese telecom giant, invested $40 million of the total in early 2011.

That’s a lot of dough, so it is not clear what has happened or if Perlman is poised to sell off the entity.

Sony recently bought one of OnLive’s rivals in the space — Gaikai — for $380 million to turbocharge its cloud-gaming service efforts.

One thing is entirely clear: While egregiously denying it was doing so, the gaming and virtual desktop software start-up is effectively shutting down OnLive as it has been previously run.

Earlier today, an OnLive spokesperson denied the obvious situation.

“We don’t respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down,” OnLive said, while also bizarrely flacking their games.

Last week, I heard a rumor of just this thing happening and asked a spokesperson last Friday via email: “I hear via very good sources it is closing down or cutting back.”

This was the disingenuous response: “The latest rumors have been around acquisitions — this is a new one! Not the case, but officially we never comment on rumors.”

No need for comment, as you can see from the photo above and also here that was just sent to me.

OnLive launched in 2010 as a Web portal for streaming games, which it demoed here, from the D: All Things Digital conference in 2010.

As Lauren Goode wrote earlier: “In addition to its cloud-based gaming platform, which runs on PCs, tablets and now Google TV products, OnLive also offers [Microsoft] Office-based, virtual desktop software for [Apple] iPads and [Google] Android tablets, which got the Palo-Alto-based start up in some hot water with Microsoft earlier this year.”

Mashable first reported on the possible layoffs earlier. Let’s upgrade that to actual.