The online boom accelerated by the Corona crisis is bringing both Google and Microsoft excellent business.

While the Google parent company Alphabet cemented its position as online advertising prime with a record profit in the third quarter, the world's largest software company Microsoft benefited from the high demand for storage space and applications in the cloud due to the trend towards hybrid working with switching between home and office.

In contrast to Facebook and the Snapchat operator Snap, Google hardly felt the effects of Apple's new data protection rules.

In the third quarter, Alphabet sales climbed 39 percent on a currency-neutral basis to $ 65.1 billion, according to Tuesday. Around four fifths of the income came from the advertising business. The world's largest search engine provider benefited from the fact that people are spending more and more time online. Google is by far the company that sells the most ads online in the world. While Facebook recently struggled with the fact that the new iPhone operating system made it more difficult to track user behavior on the Internet, Google's advertising business was hardly affected. Experts justified this with the fact that the search engine collects data on user interests that are relevant and unrivaled for advertisers.

The video portal YouTube has blossomed into a firm guarantee of sales, with sales increasing by 44 percent to 7.2 billion dollars.

Alphabet profits increased by as much as 69 percent to $ 18.9 billion.

Alphabet thus triumphed with the third record win in a row.

The cloud business Google Cloud lagged slightly behind expectations, with sales climbing 45 percent to almost five billion dollars.

Here Microsoft - with Azure the number two ahead of Google and behind Amazon's AWS - achieved an increase of 48 percent.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood spoke of a "strong start" in the cloud business for the Microsoft fiscal year that began in July.

Microsoft's group revenues climbed from July to September, also thanks to strong income from the Xbox game console, by 22 percent to 45.3 billion dollars.

That was well above the previously cherished expectations of professional market observers - just like sales with Windows and Teams software applications and through the career network LinkedIn.

Total profit increased by 22 percent currency adjusted to $ 17.2 billion in the first fiscal quarter.