A few days ago I published a post analyzing the growth in revenue for Microsoft's Surface division: "Surface by the numbers: How Microsoft reinvented the PC."[1]
To get those numbers, I went through a big (virtual) stack of official SEC filings and had to do a fair amount of math. As I noted in the original post, "[The] FY2015 annual report was the one and only time Microsoft has disclosed its annual Surface revenue instead of hiding it in a series of arithmetic problems over the course of four quarterly reports."
In the comments of that post, several readers insinuated that I was making those numbers up. Well, no.
Microsoft doesn't directly report revenue for each of its many product lines. So, even though Surface has become a fairly large chunk of its business, it doesn't get its own line in quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) reports to the SEC.
Instead, the company reports actual revenues and gross income by segment. The More Personal Computing segment includes Windows, Devices, Gaming, and Search advertising. The Devices division, in turn, consists of "Microsoft Surface, PC accessories, and other intelligent devices" (that last group includes HoloLens, for example).
In the body of each quarterly report, the company usually reports Surface revenue indirectly, highlighting the increase (or decrease) in revenue from the corresponding previous period and then presenting that as a percentage.
As I noted in a reply to one comment that essentially accused me of fabricating the numbers:
You're welcome to go through all those 10-Qs and 10-Ks and do the math. As I said in the story, Microsoft does disclose the numbers, but they do it as a series of arithmetic problems.