Microsoft Misses Quarterly Revenue Projection 327
monsterhead78 wrote to alert us to a BusinessWeek article discussing Microsoft's uncharacteristic miss of its own fiscal projections for the third quarter. From the article: "Three months ago, the software giant said it expected revenue for the period to come in between $9.7 billion and $9.8 billion. But when the company released results Apr. 28, it came up short. Microsoft (MSFT ) rang up just $9.62 billion in sales, a 5% increase from the year-ago quarter."
Off by $0.08 Billion? (Score:2, Interesting)
And for a different take . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting to me was this quote:
Microsoft said that its home division - which includes Xbox - turned a profit for the first time, as did MSN.
Could be... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just another way Microsoft is copying Apple.
It took me a while to grasp how much money Microsoft is making. 9.6 Billion dollars. $9,620,000,000.00. I wonder how many nations have a GNP less than what microsoft does in sales??
When Windows first came out, 3.1 was the version for me, I loved it. Before that I was stuck with DOS on my 386. Then Windows 95, I could not believe how beautiful it was, and 98, WOW all the support for multimedia and MMX. But ever since Windows 2000, my love of their product has been dying.
I dunno who is to blame more. Part of me puts the blame 100% on hackers who write viruses. There are a good number of people who blame microsoft for making a bad product. I guess the question would be, if Microsoft was making door locks instead of software, and their locks were crap, who would be responsible for breaking into a house? If everyone knew MS locks = stick a plastic butter knife and unlock, would that make the hacker any less criminal for breaking and entering.
But that is not the point. Microsoft does not offer me the product I want.
And then, with the Slashdot story a few days ago of discovering Microsoft is not only lobbying for their buisness interests (staying a monopoly) but also on social issues I decided I am through buying their product.
Damn, I wish IBM's OS/2 stayed alive. Looking back on 1992, if only it would have caught on, maybe we would have had a choice when it comes to an OS. Instead, we have linux which is being sued. What real choice does a buisness have? Use linux and risk being sued? Pay an outrageous license for unix? We needed OS/2 as a second legitimate choice for the X86 platform.
Why this is happening, IMO (Score:3, Interesting)
In our organization, spending on software has declined almost to nothing. We no longer buy MS Office products because OpenOffice.org has eliminated the need to do so; all of our critical infrastructure runs on Linux and FreeBSD; and the desktops and workstations that run Windows continue to run the same versions of Windows that originally came on those workstations. Therefore, we use Windows 98, Me, and XP Personal, which came on several eMachines we bought for office use. And the funniest thing is that while the Linux and FreeBSD boxes continue to use the latest stable and release versions of the OS and software, the Windows boxes have not been upgraded, and there are no plans to do so. It would only be costly, and would offer us nothing in exchange. And I believe the same applies to countless organizations the world over. People will simply not continue to upgrade hardware and software forever.
That, my friends, is why Microsoft missed its quarterly revenue projection.
Re:Been there (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What! The Street loved the results (Score:1, Interesting)
Which is exactly what they have been doing, big time in the recent quarters. I haven't checked the current report to see how much more cutting they have done.
But the real reason they were able to show a profit increase is the insane legal costs they had last year compared to this year so far.
The market cares about revenue growth.
Off the top of my head it is something like this over the past few years:
%15->%13->%10->%8->%5
Wallstreet knows this and that is why MS's stock is going down into the teens over the next few months all while MS fanboys brag about 'increasing profits!!!"
Re:What! The Street loved the results (Score:3, Interesting)
I just find it comforting, with my deflating techie salary and rising energy prices, that at least somebody is having a good time.
Perspective ... you zealots... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What! The Street loved the results (Score:4, Interesting)
Revenue (i.e., top line) growth is necessary for the long-term growth of the company. Earnings (i.e., bottom line) are more representative of the short term quarter-to-quarter health of the company.
When was the last time that Microsoft came up short on revenue for a quarter?
Revnues missed due to currency flucations (Score:4, Interesting)
What was important - and eye opening here - is that even with a miss on the revenue side, earnings were double what they were in the year ago quarter.
While you can't continually grow the bottom line (earnings), with a shrinking top line, it is positive and says something good when a company has robust earnings even in the face of declining revenues.
If you break down the revenues you find something interesting. Strong improvements in both Server products and XBox. Both of these are positives for Microsoft and are in line with their long-term directions.
Yours,
Jordan
Halving of R&D budget isn't the story? (Score:4, Interesting)
My question, since R&D covers almost all new development in the company,
Which products/programs where cut?
Have they dropped their "Inovate" slogan?
Re:a couple ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's like taking your through a drive-thru in a part of town you don't know and ending up with a feces-hurling monkey chained to your back seat.
The day I switched to Firefox and never looked back was the day I got reamed with 3 different spywares and a porn dialer by fat-fingering a URL and ending up at some horrible typosquatting cesspool.
Re:a couple ideas... (Score:2, Interesting)
I just relate this to you that what the original poster suggested wasn't such a bad idea. If Microsoft is going to be charging hundreds of dollars for their software (which I've declined to use for almost 5 years now, no thank you), then it would be in their best interest to try to get rid of bugs.
Also I have a lot of friends who use Win XP, and at first they always claim what you say, "never crashes, never locks up, works great" but after a while they let slip a lot of the b.s. they have to deal with. That being said if you know what you are doing and take care of your computer XP probably would be great, but not for average Joe Newbie... I have no reason to think you are not telling the complete truth, just letting you know my opinion :)
Re:a couple ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, you are absolutely correct--Macromedia products are particularly shoddy. While I think that Dreamweaver's interface is fairly bad, that is opinion. It is not an opinion that they are flaky and unreliable though.
Macromedia fans can throw "PEBKAC" and "RTFM" and "Stupid User Error" all they like. Myself (who is not a web developer) and several professional web developers that I know, including those that somehow like Dreamweaver, have all found it to be the worst of crap in terms of software quality, crashing randomely on a wide variety of systems. In addition to crashing, they often exhibit strange, generally flaky behavior. For example, when I use the edit preview mode (in which you can see a rough preview of what the rendered HTML will look like, and edit it in WYSIWYG mode), the cursor in the HTML preview will be between two characters and the cursor in the source code preview will be offset by one character. As you edit one, the cursor in the other is in the wrong place. Admittedly this was not with the latest version (first release of the "MX" line, though for as long as Dreamweaver had been out, you'd think it would be a mature product).
Big deal? Not at all, but a mass of tiny details are what make the difference between a good product and a shoddy piece of junkware. I won't even go into how it, incredibly, isn't snappy even on a Pentium IV 3GHz HT and 1GB of RAM. Perhaps I've been spoiled by top-quality editors like Jed (a modified release of EMacs), Visual Studio (yes, a Microsoft product. Oh my!), and Kate.
Hopefully Adobe, who makes (IMO) very reliable (if a little hard to use) software, can hire a management team that will give the programmers time to clean up the mess they've likely been forced to make due to the usual bad PHB decisions.
That said, unfortunately, every other feature-rich web-language editor I've tried is lacking in other ways, at least in my opinion. (The editors I mentioned above are editors I used in general, they aren't really HTML editors). About the nicest I've seen for Windows is PHPEdit, which still has a number of really irritating problems, but is at least stable and consistent, not to mention mostly free (Google for it if curious). If only they'd fix the asinine "CTRL-Y deletes lines of text in addition to being redo" bug that persists to this day, and also persists in other editors that use that crappy Delphi text widget (Dev-C++ comes to mind).
As for GAIM, all I can say is GTK-based products are crap in Windows. Try Miranda--it sucks less. I've never found any GTK app to be fast, stable, or well integrated other than in GNOME and XFCE. This isn't GAIM's fault--it's a great LINUX chat client which has been ported to Windows, using a took kit that's little more than bolted on. GTK and Windows do not seem to mix well, and no, The GIMP is not an example otherwise--it still sucks in Windows.
IE has always been remarkably flaky for me. As much as people make fun of it and as much as you lose "geek points" for using it, it is one of the fastest browsers around (it loads faster even under WINE in Linux than Firefox does natively on any platform) and it is easily the best supported, though that is more due to its ubiquity than its support for web features (which by the way sucks--IE's CSS support has made me want to plan more than a few discreet assassinations at Microsoft).
That said, while it appears to be quite stable for many people, it's rarely gone more than 2-3 days without crashing on me, and taking out a number of other processes with it. Maybe I ask too much of it running 15 copies at once. But then, Firefox seems to have little problem (though it is still occasionally flaky).
In any case, Linux users have had extremely legitimate gripes against Windows for the longest time, but since the release of Windows 2000, I think the snide remarks are riding on Windows' old reputation r