“Microsoft today announced quarterly revenue of $18.06 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2012. Operating income and loss per share for the quarter were $192 million and $0.06 per share. The financial results reflect the previously announced non-cash, non-tax-deductible income statement charge of $6.19 billion for the impairment of goodwill and the deferral of $540 million of revenue related to the Windows Upgrade Offer.”
Microsoft reports first loss in history and gets little to no attention from OSnews aka Thom’s Blog. Riiiight…
Uhhh…he says right there that they posted a loss, and he also posted the earning for Google, what more do you want?
Its not like the entire planet doesn’t know MSFT is a total disaster right now, you have articles talking about “the lost decade” while Forbes names Ballmer worst CEO, Windows 8 looks like it’ll be the second coming of MS Bob and they can’t give away the WinPhone, so what else do ya wanna know?
“MSFT run by lousy CEO, company bleeds money, now for the weather…water is wet…back to you Chuck”. Not really any more to say friend, its not like MSFT is gonna listen, or change direction, not as long as Ballmer and Sinofsky work there. When the board gets tired of flushing billions down the toilet (how many HAS Ballmer blown? 30? 40?) and punts Ballmer like a 30 yard field return THEN it’ll be news, but MSFT sucking and lost since Ballmer took over? who doesn’t know that?
Microsoft posted an operating income of $6.9 billion profit. I’m struggling to see how this means Microsoft is a total disaster.
The reason is that the result is extremly poor for a company that has a monopoly in several areas and is part of duopolies and triopolies. A lower than expected revenue means lower share payout than expected and people get angry that microsoft has not utilized it’s *polies to a greater and better extent. Personally i prefer microsoft under Ballmer than under Gates. Interoperabillity has been alot better and the people hired is not such dicks as they used to be during win98-winME era.
I actually like doing buissness with microsoft now. (shocker)
Microsoft’s operating income was 6.9 billion, the expectations were 5.8 billion. So what are you talking about?
Funny, I liked it better under Gates and here is why: while interoperability is indeed better, which I would argue would have happened anyway simply because MSFT couldn’t control the web, one of the two critical products it has has frankly suffered BADLY under Ballmer and I’m of course talking about the OS.
Gates had it right when he had the consumer OS and the business OS as separate properties because frankly what is good in one isn’t good in another. the business users (and the gamers frankly) want a low resource OS that just gets out of the way so they can run their third party apps (or games) with a minimum of fuss. the consumers want more wizards, hand holding, and lots of pretty.
Ballmer’s entire strategy has been to make consumer bling and if it works for business fine, if not he doesn’t care. It was able to work with XP simply because it was released at the start of a MHz war so PCs quickly became so powerful the bling didn’t matter. Vista and Win 8 are perfect examples of ignoring business for the sake of consumer markets only in the case of win 8 they aren’t even using focus groups, just making this mish mash mess of a tweeting twitting social crap to try to lure the FB generation.
Its sad, that is what it is. as you pointed out just the monopolies and duopolies should have gave them 3 to 4 times what it did, even in a down economy, and would have if Ballmer hadn’t been spending like a drunken sailor while ignoring his customers. Here is the Steve Ballmer strategy in 3 steps, 1.-See what is popular, 2.-buy or build a half baked copy that is buggy and behind the curve, 3.-fail miserably.
Give me Gates any day, he may have been an ass but he was an ass with a plan, all Ballmer is is a copycat and not even a good one at that.
Old consumer Windows, while for a long time much more viable or even better than most alternatives ( http://www.osnews.com/thread?522221 ), were still kinda rubbish. The world is better off without them.
Corps use the “bloat” of all the included tools a lot; you simply don’t have to use them; them being available doesn’t really impact performance, the bling still doesn’t matter (plus, win8 is kinda more snappy)
It was in the times of Ballmer that some nice new things were pushed through (Ribbon doesn’t seem like much of a copycat; Xbox seems to have most healthy ~indy tooling & ecosystem around it, and recently innovates most in the field, with Kinect; the table kind of Surface is very theirs), or things that perhaps were painful but necessary (the technical overhaul of Vista, largely responsible for Vista SE being the most adored OS evah)
Maybe Thom didn’t make a big deal of it because he realizes that this “loss” is just on paper? The loss actually took place 5 years ago with a bonehead purchase of aQuantive; a 6 billion dollar purchase that resulting in no revenue.
Microsoft just happened to take the charge for that debacle this quarter; they could’ve done taken the charge for any of the previous 10 quarters or any of the upcoming 10 quarters. In other words, the aQuantive loss has nothing to do with the state of the company for this particular quarter; it reflects a stupid decision made years ago.
What really reflects the state of the company for this quarter is the record earnings (contrary to the rantings of bassbeast). Note that Wall Street ignored the “loss” (as the aQuantive charge had been announced weeks ago), and liked the record earnings which clobbered the expectations.
Edited 2012-07-20 05:50 UTC
You clearly don’t understand financial reports. Thom is actually one of the few news sites not to use that as a headline grabber / flame bait.
Microsoft has had an extremely profitable quarter. In fact, they were so profitable that they decided to write down the value of assets pertaining to a company it acquired back in 2007.
When stuff like that happens, you write down the value of those assets on the balance sheet. It does not represent a cash expense, it’s just an accounting loss driven by a 2007 acquisition.
Frankly, I preferred the pre-2001 situation, in which companies were allowed to amortize goodwill. The cost of an acquisition should be reflected over time, rather than taken as a lump-sum impairment.
By forcing goodwill to stay on the books until impaired, GAAP has set up a situation in which the accounting fails to reflect the actual economic situation, no matter which way you look at it. You can’t look at GAAP results, because they claim that Microsoft lost money this quarter, which is obviously untrue. You can’t use the non-GAAP results either, because they claim that Microsoft did not waste a penny on aQuantive back in 2007, which is also untrue.
Amortization has problems — how long do you amortize over? But that can be solved with rules — and after all, the whole point of GAAP is that it’s rules-based while IFRS is principles-based. When the FASB threw out amortization entirely in 2001, they threw out the baby with the bathwater. They traded a flawed-but-logical situation for a completely ridiculous situation.
Edited 2012-07-20 17:12 UTC
I wish to see them die soon..
MS is the worst thing that could happen to tech and internet. close at least.
Agreed.
the Microsoft hatred is a disease – Linus Torvalds.
MS largely succeeding in their “a PC in every home” goal, the overall economies of scale that Wintel brought, is largely what gave you this nice, inexpensive, powerful machine that you use, MS OS or not. Other paths weren’t nearly so certain to bring this toy of yours so quickly (or even not at all http://www.osnews.com/thread?522221 ). Oh and with internet, IE was at some point a blessing & it won because of being a much better browser.