Windows 7 and Office 2010 – Microsoft’s latest assets that brought huge increase in sales revenue, Microsoft on Thursday reported that its quarterly sales soared. Microsoft per-share earnings were 51 cents, the Redmond, Wash., software giant reported net income rose 48%, to 4.5 Billion in its fiscal 4th quarter. Sales rose 22% to a record $16 billion higher than Apple’s $15.7 billion. The CNN Money report said, it was enough to keep Microsoft ahead of Apple in the closely watched sales race between the one time arch rivals.

In a prepared statement, Microsoft’s chief Operating Officer said, “We saw strong sales execution across all of our businesses, particularly in the enterprise with Windows 7 and Office 2010. We look forward to continuing our product momentum this fall with the upcoming launches of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Kinect.”

Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 and reached general retail availability on October 22, 2009. While Office 2010 was released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010 and the suite became available for retail as well as online purchase last June 15, 2010.

Windows Phone 7 is the next version of the Windows Phone operating system which set to release on October 2010. In a recent announcement, Microsoft said, every employee would get a Windows Phone 7 device once it is launched to become part of an effort to create some unexpected hits and seed the market using the energy from Microsoft’s pool of internal developers.

Xbox Kinect is a controller-free gaming and entertainment experience. It enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller through a natural user interface using gestures, spoken commands or presented objects and images.  Kinect is scheduled to launch worldwide starting with North America on November 4, 2010.