All the big technology companies announced quarterly earnings at the end of July and a few things were made crystal clear: It’s a great time to be selling cloud services, subscription models have their downsides and Google and Facebook are increasingly advertising juggernauts.

What other lessons can we draw from tech companies’ individual performances of late?

Facebook

Facebook has aggressively gone after the mobile market. One billion people use the Facebook Messenger app and its daily mobile users are up 22% year over year. Of its $6.24 billion in ad revenue, 84% ($5.42 billion) came from mobile ads. Now that everyone has Facebook on their phone, the company is investing heavily in live video and Messenger chatbots in an effort to keep us compulsively checking the app.
Takeaway: Facebook’s success has always come from anticipating what’s next, like the shift from desktop to mobile. Now they’re betting on live video and chatbots. History says they’re probably right.

Microsoft

Microsoft pulled strong this quarter with revenues of $22.6 billion, slightly surpassing analysts’ predictions. How’d it do that, considering the decline in its Windows operating system segment and mobile-phone business? The answer is the company’s cloud service, Azure, which doubled its revenue this quarter. This growth in cloud services is more than compensating for the drag on the bottom line still created by the company’s failed foray into the phone business.
Takeaway: Companies won’t win every big bet, but hitting on just one can make all the difference. The important thing is to keep your chips on the table.

Netflix

Netflix made $2.11 billion in revenue, in line with analyst expectations. But Netflix didn’t meet its own growth projections, only adding 160,000 new U.S. subscribers out of a target of 500,000. Internationally, it expected to recruit 2 million, but it only recruited 1.52 million. On top of that, it has found that price increases pushed some to cancel their subscriptions.

Takeaway: Netflix has found a real price sensitivity among subscribers. What happens to all these streaming subscription services — Spotify, HBO Go, etc. — when it comes time to raise the price?

IBM

IBM’s revenue continues to slide, and this quarter was its 17th straight in decline. IBM is pushing through with investments and acquisitions in cloud services and AI that support its transition from hardware company to intelligence company. Some of that investment has paid off: there was a 30% increase in cloud services sales.

Takeaway: It’s not just startups that can pivot. Legacy companies can (and must) undertake transformational change.

Apple

Apple’s stock has risen, even with the company experiencing its second consecutive decline in quarterly earnings. What’s got everyone bullish about the iPhone maker in a saturated smartphone market? While iPhone sales were down 15%, Apple’s services category, which includes the App Store, iTunes, iCloud and other services, saw a 19% spike in revenue.

Takeaway: Explosive growth in selling hardware may be over, but there’s still room to grow in providing content and services to devices.

Twitter

Stop us if you’ve heard this story before: Twitter’s stock has taken a hit. Though it posted revenues of $602 million for the quarter, Twitter’s active user base of 313 million is growing so slowly that it’s starting to look like a stall. That’s giving pause to advertisers.

Takeaway: Maintaining strong user growth is essential to attracting advertisers.

Yahoo

Yahoo’s internet business shrunk to a fraction of its former self — and now that fraction has been sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion. This past quarter it experienced a net loss of $440 million. Its core search and ad-display revenue fell significantly, 13% and 24%, respectively. Its $1.1 billion acquisition, Tumblr, has been devalued to $482 million, one of a number of big acquisitions that failed to deliver.

Takeaway: As we read in The Economist, Yahoo’s failures, especially in online advertising, boiled down to a key fact: while it had the ad delivery technology, it never knew as much about its users as Google or Facebook.

Amazon

Some of Amazon’s experiments are paying off handsomely. Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services, Fire TV media player, Kindle ebook readers and Amazon Dash Buttons all did their part to bring in $30.4 billion in revenue. It saw a huge jump — 31% — in net sales over the same quarter last year. The company also still seems serious about delivery by drone and is expanding its grocery service, Amazon Fresh.

Takeaway: Domination requires constant experimentation. Even Amazon is constantly looking for new ways to engage e-commerce consumers.

Alphabet

Alphabet, née Google, did pretty well, scoring $17.5 billion in revenue, up 21% year over year. Its spun-offspring didn’t do so well: Nest, Fiber and Verily brought in a loss of $859 million. Its favorite child performed nicely: Google had paid clicks up 29% year over year and its ad revenue had solid performance. Google’s Play Store and hardware services snagged $2.17 billion in revenue.

Takeaway: Google’s core search ad business subsidized its “moonshot” experiments for years, but now that these new businesses are being spun off from the mothership it’s sink or swim time.