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Microsoft Posts First Quarterly Loss Ever
HangingChad writes "Microsoft's announcement of a late October release date for Windows 8 was eclipsed by its earnings report, in which the computer giant posted its first-ever quarterly loss since going public in 1986. The loss stems from Microsoft's continued struggles with the online services division."
We waited for this for too long!
The loss stems from a giant write down of a purchase gone bust ($6.2billion) from 2007. Otherwise it would have been a great quarter for "M$".
But don't let that stop the speculation about how "M$" is about to die.
No, Microsoft did not bring in less money than it spent. It has decided to wash its hands off of some of the investments it made. It wrote down the value of some of the stuff it owns, and that is shown as a loss.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This should be the end of Steve Ballmer's reign. He was a genius at muscling OEMs into screwing over the competition, but now that Windows is so ubiquitous, there's nothing else for him to do but retire.
That loss is entirely down to the aQuantive 6.2 billion writedown. As far as analyst estimates are concerned, taking that into account, this is actually a beat. Take a look at after-hours stock price movement. Did MSFT get slammed?
"The loss stems from Microsoft's continued struggles with the online services division."
That's a flat-out deception! The loss stems from the fact that they made a 6 billion dollar write-off. The summary makes it seem like their online division is just naturally bleeding billions.
Millions, maybe, but not billions.
0xB16B00B5
Ref: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/07/19/1923200/microsoft-apologizes-for-inserting-naughty-phrase-into-linux-kernel
Here's a great example of mainstream media blowing things up to get eyes on their site. Microsoft had one of the best FYQ4s ever and if it wasn't for a write off of $6 billion on a stupid acquisition in 2007 it would have made a huge profit. MS stock is up and investors are happy. Haters are going to hate.
My-my, what a perfect opportunity to analyze the differences between bulls and bears in the 21st century.
There are definitely those who will say this means the beginning of the end and who will sell, and those who will say this means nothing except a company has reached the maturity to be expected of any stock and that this is the beginning of the beginning and will hold. There are those who this is the first time they ever heard of Microsoft and they will buy because they figure, hell, the price is low, good time to buy.
As the Owl said in the Tootsie-Pop commercial, "Let's -- a'find out!"
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Yes, because Google didn't do a $6.2 billion writedown like Microsoft did.
Flamebait? I hate MS as much as the next guy, but the AC above is accurately pointing out factual errors in the summary. It's deceptive (and raises false hope in some).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
They wrote down a turd whose asset value wasn't worth what they paid. Look at the cash flows. They continue to generate billions of cash.
SEC filing
In and of itself this isn't a big deal. They wrote off some bad investments, so what? The problem is that everyone watches MS looking for any sign of weakness. It's more the perception that they don't have it anymore than any reality. I believe this is the beginning of the end, not of MS but of their overwhelming dominance that they've enjoyed for so long.
The second sentence is basically true, but the first is somewhat misleading. Essentially, they recognized that a $6.3 billion purchase of aQuantive that they made (which wasn't counted as an expense at the time, because it was treated as the acquisition of an asset of equal value to the purchase price) was, in fact, almost a pure expense, since the asset they acquired turns out to be pretty much entirely worthless (they took a $6.2 billion writedown against the $6.3 billion purchase.)
But that writedown is money that was actually spent, its just money that was spent in 2007 and not counted as an expense then.
In addition to its $6.2 billion disaster of a purchase, Microsoft made another critical mistake in 2007: It failed to recognize the debut of Apple's iPhone as the game-changer it turned out to be and missed the launch of the touchscreen revolution. Its partnership with troubled Finnish cell phone company Nokia notwithstanding, Windows phones barely have a toehold in the iOS-Android duopoly.
It is par for the course for Microsoft to phoo phoo anything new (Remember "640K memory is enough for everyone", "You mean companies are going to print their URLs in their advertisements?" ) and then play catch up. Usually that strategy worked out for Microsoft because corporate computers formed 90% or more of the computing platforms in the world, and it had a stranglehold on that market.
Two things stymied Microsoft in the cell phone arena. First was obvious: It lacked market dominance for ram through bad but barely adequate competitor and swamp out the competition.
But there was a second player, that we slashdotter would loathe to give credit to. The much maligned evil phone companies. They are used to getting hefty margins peddling corded and cordless plain old telephone equipment. They saw what happened to the manufacturers of the ubiquitous beige boxes. They were reducing competing purely on price, the brutal price war changed the landscape. In the 1990s the hardware accounted for 95% of the cost of the computer and the software was hardly 5%. While software prices remained stable and went up (MS-Office retailed for $550 when the PCs had fallen below 500$ mark). The telcos were determined to not to let that happen to them. Being incompatible with Microsoft, and not giving it any toehold was the common strategy.
So even if someone in Microsoft saw the threat of iPhone that company is too big to move nimbly, too bogged down in earlier mode of competing, it had made too many enemies, it has stabbed the back of too many partners and it has scared off too many partners.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Uh huh. Except that if you take out the writedown their quarter was pretty close to the previous one in which they had $6.6 billion in net income.
More like M-$
Shit, dont any of you know Accounting 101?
(M$)
Write off or not the fact is they still lost billions of dollars. And that was due to a very bad business decision.
You know, I keep hearing this, but I do not understand how that is true. Were it true, you, being a slashdotter and thus years ahead would be composing this on a tablet. Apparently the soft-keyboard and such are no bother, nor is the lack of easy copy/paste functions. Personally, I'm typing this on my workstation which will never, ever, ever leave my office. Nor should it. I create content and solve problems on it. People may later consume said content but if you want to actually get anything more serious than email done, you need a real computer. Furthermore, could you imagine spending 8 hours a day on a tablet? That is a laughable suggestion. Given that unemployment is less than 50%, I suspect most people using computers for something other than leisure will still use a keyboard at some point during the day.
religions all around the world today had a flock of new believers
They would actually be more valuable broken up. Windows could still do their thing. Office could support whatever platform they wanted to. Imagine a version of Office for Mac with a comparable version of Excel and Access. SQL Server on Linux boxes.
Also, I would say there is a difference between decline and not being in your high growth phase and abnormally dominant phase.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Obviously it's not going to sink the company but it's showing a lot of poor judgement. 6 billion is hardly the chump change most are claiming. How many years did it take for the gaming division to even show a total of 6 billion in profits? The first ten years they seemed unstoppable but the last ten years they seem to be the game that can't shoot straight. The company just feels chaotic like they have no long term plans. I don't like Apple but it still feels like they know their product line for the next 5 years and maybe even have a road map for 10 years.
I realize that this loss is in no way indicative of MS's demise.
But it still had me thinking about what will happen the day that there is nothing left to do for MS except patent litigation. That won't be pretty.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Microsoft's problem is exactly that it has bought into this "threat of the iPhone" meme.
Microsoft and Apple have different markets and different sales channels. By trying to compete with Apple, Microsoft is exchanging a position of dominance in enterprise "productivity" computing for one of abject weakness in consumer/mobile/fashion computing. In so doing, it is alienating its partners and customers even more than usually.
Sure, enterprise computing is a mature market, and it's not possible to continue double-digit growth in it any more. Big deal. Are electricity utilities reinventing themselves as iOS app developers? No; they are making good money in a static to declining market. That's the mature, high-return, low-risk strategy.
Microsoft needs to ignore Apple; if it doesn't, lawyers will be getting fat off aggrieved shareholders.
OS/2 is finally winning!
This will also help Ballmer say Windows 8 "saved the company" with their first profitable quarter after terrible, terrible losses.
It's all marketing.
From my experience of the corporate world, when you have a bad period you whitewash it with a write down!
Just use a heavy flow tampon and take some Ibuprofen for the pain.
BM3
And I hope one day you learn the difference between "loose" and "lose."
Except for a paper write down which only acknowledged a fact of reality established years ago, they made 5.7billion. And that's in anticipation of a big release in the near future, that is probably limiting current sales until the release.
Buy now.
It would be interesting to see if they piled on a few other write downs.
2007 would have been the bad year then. That year Microsoft released Vista and bought the ad company now being written off as a loss. Of course, Vista was almost instantly recognized as a bad decision, unlike Microsoft's venture into online advertising.
Until there's something out there that "doesn't suck", I'd like Microsoft to remain healthy and viable.
Apple's walled garden where everything will soon have to be bought through the app store and whose server product is laughable? Nah.
Linux flavor of the week that totally ignores the need for corporate Groupware and thumbs it's nose at the idea of a homogeneous environment? Nah.
BeOS? Mayyyyybe
So I suppose one option is better than none....
I think this is an excellent observation, while it really won't hurt MS to go after the mobile phone market since Windows Mobile wasn't going anywhere - they are about to plunge into a new battle where they are going to sacrifice one of their cash-cows (Windows/Office) to compete with iOS and Android.
They should focus on the enterprise market, and find ways to compete on iOS/Android without writing another tablet OS.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
They wrote off a TON of money in "good will" valuation of their company because some stupid bullshit I've never heard of from 2007 didn't pan out. You can't lose customer good will over something they've never heard of. But, as far as I know, they never wrote off any good will during the Vista catastrophe. I don't think any company has had any single, short period loss of good will in human history equal to what Vista did (pending Windows 8's release lol).
It seems to me the cash cows they can milk by raising the prices, but Ballmer can't create NEW cash-cows internally in MS, not only that, this tells me he can't even BUY new cash cows from outside.
You can make light of this, but this is spent money, and yet it took him 5 years to realize he'd wasted it???? The man is an idiot, a shouty salesman whose biggest sales job is to keep himself in power.
He's losing the Windows market, this is what gets me the most, you can see it all unfolding in slow motion as people switch away from Windows and he's making it worse by splitting Windows into two competing versions! It reminds me of IBM making PCs and also selling cloned PCs in competition with itself. It made IBM clearly inferior because even they didn't believe their PCs were worth it.
Now we have MS, launching 2 tablets, one that is more compatible than the other, but not fully compatible, and one that has a better battery life but not as good as the competition. Two half products in a market that's getting away from them.
And nobody dares sack shouty salesman for fear of chairs flying???
Now that they've completely lost the plot (ref: Windows 8) why are people still taking these clowns seriously enough to let them hold the keys for the next generation of PC hardware?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Obama has given me a truck load of reasons not to vote for him, I don't really need any more.
Got Code?
Uh, yeah, after years of being hammered by Maddow and Olbermann on MS-NBC I'm sure Republicans are crying in their beer over Obama "ruining" Microsoft to the point where NBC even disowned them.
Don't panic Mr Mannering!
Task Mangler
I have an iPad and an Android phone. Both will use a Bluetooth or USB keyboard, and both have perfectly usable Copy/Paste functionality for text, which is sufficient for posting to Slashdot.
"Yeah, they've "lost" like 5% market share with windows"
No more like 72%, you might like to count historical sales and then use market share in terms of units out there in total, but the investors are only interested in new sales.
76 million Android devices last quarter, about 50 million Apple devices, there's about 200 million PCs sold a year, about 50 million Windows units in an average quarter.
Yes, you read correctly, Apple sells about as many iPad/iPhone/Macs as Microsoft sells Windows 7 licenses.
50 million Windows 7 licenses/quarter.
76 million Android activations/ quarter
46 million iOS devices, 50 million is you add the Mac sales / quarter.
See for yourself, they're market share is down to less than 30%, soon Apple will be selling more iOs devices than Microsoft sells Windows.
Most of you don't know this, but Microsoft gives out bonuses and stock grants in September. This is a good excuse to stiff the employees a bit, and by god they're gonna use it. Being employed by a Microsoft's competitor, I can't help but like this course of events, since we get an influx of resumes from there every October or so, and while most of the people who apply should really be flipping burgers instead, every now and then we do hire a brilliant engineer.
a $6.3 billion purchase of aQuantive
Seriously - whoever made this deal for aQuantive is a certified genius. That was about 1000x their earnings. People say Amazon investors are absolutely batshit crazy for buying at 187x earnings, and they're not a third-rung company.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
I'll point something else out here: Microsoft has a lot of products, a LOT, and most of them are small income products. The one thing they have in common is THEY ARE BUILT FOR THE WINDOWS ECOSYSTEM.
If they lose the OS market, they lose everything. Because Ballmer's pride won't ever let him port all those apps to whatever is selling, he'll follow Windows market share down to zero.
I know it's popular to say "well IBM are still doing well", but they're not doing well in the PC market place. They were lucky to find a lot of government contracts and services saved them, but they lost the PC market to others. Will MS find a market to run to if they lose Windows??? If so what market??
Is it Schadenfreude to simply spell out the truth here?? They've ALREADY lost the OS market, they're LOSING the apps market. The apps market trails the OS market, because of the legacy sales. Those XP users are potential customers too, even if they're not sales in this quarter. But Ballmer is so stuck in the past, he thinks he can force XP users to upgrade to Windows 8, but they (I include me in this) will go to Android or iOS. I'm switching to Android tablet after this, already have an Asus infinity on order.
Many companies exceed earnings expectations if you decide to discount losses - but you have to squint your eyes just like you did to see that. Microsoft made a loss, it is very unlikely to be a permanent state of affairs (unless Europe charges them a possible $US 7 billion penalty for breaching their anti-monopoly conditions), but it is still a loss when you get to the bottom line. Losing $6.2 billion of shareholder value on a bad acquisition must be among the most colossal poor managemnuent decisions ever made. Will any of the management bonuses be affected? probably not. Yet another example of management shafting shareholders - which is not peculiar to Microsoft in any way.
That's my guess too. They probably had some bad news somewhere and it was a good time to jettison the liability so further quarters look much better. Hopefully they don't get pinged by the EU for $7 billion, or they will really hurt (this is unlikely though).
I think you're kidding yourself. People who use Facetime are not using Skype, people who surf on an iPad are not surfing on a PC, people who play games on the tablets are not playing games on Windows. For me my PC was mainly stock trading and email/messaging, that's now mainly on an Android tablet.
You can claim that somehow Windows market is special, for 'real-work', but I use a Galaxy Note for most of my 'real work' and the PC is used only for its large screen when I happen to be in my office. When I've switched to an Infinity Pad, it won't even be the largest screen computer I have, at that point the charts will shown on the Android tablet and the PC will remain off.
Oh, and I plan on buying a MTH (?) cable for the note so I can plug it into my TV and watch streaming TV in HD. I never bought a Windows Media PC, and now never will.
Ballmer thinks he can grow Windows to take over the tablets, and Apple/Google believe they can grow tablets to take over Windows, two of those companies grew market share enormously quickly and one lost market share.
You said this:
"In America, at least, 99.9% of the people who own an Android phone or iPhone own at least one desktop PC, laptop, or both IN ADDITION to their phone."
You can pretend the iPad is a complement to the PC, but they are both just general purpose computing devices that overlap. I bet they bought the iPad despite owning a PC. Not the PC despite owning an iPad.
Speaking of manufacturing the numbers and Enron accounting, this would not be the first time that M$ has reported a loss. M$ went $18 billlion into the red before, if normal (non-Enron) accounting is used. That was back when times were good. Since then, sales of desktops has been slumped and, thus, the OEM sales of Windows upon which the whole beast lives.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Who says anything about making money? Guess AC doesn't know what market share means.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Apple's server seems to me to not be laughable at all. Rather it fulls an important niche that Windows Home Server used to fill, before Microsoft crippled it: an easy to manage small business server. For 20, 30, 50 laptops, desktops, tablets and phones it is a terrific server to managed by a dentist or a office manager in a plumbing company.
I remember the same arguments being made in the early 1990s by the people who were really using workstations about those x86 "workstations"
I remember the same arguments being made about a decade ago about laptops
I remember the same arguments being made about mainframes and minis to client server.
Phones and tablets are about a decade behind laptops in terms of computational power. I most certainly did use /. in previous years on laptops which have less CPU, Ram and storage than my current iPhone. And I can see lots of way to resolve the keyboard problem, just look at how much voice is genuinely being used already.
There is nothing to get rich off of. Microsoft has a long tradition of accurately publicly announcing their strategy. Shareholders don't get to sue because a strategy publicly announced and explicated repeatedly didn't work out.
Two, Microsoft has made it clear they are not interested in profitable shrinkage. They see consumer desktop as too important. They know how they moved from consumer to enterprise to beat IBM, DEC, Unisys and they do not intend to make the same mistakes. Quite simply they believe, and I think they are right, if they are knocked out of consumer by 2020 the enterprise world will look quite different by 2030 and they will find themselves supporting nothing but a few remaining legacy functions.
You can make a very good case for profitable shrinkage as being the best money making strategy for Microsoft. That is not however the strategy they choose.
Yes then they'll have to write off $12 billion.
MS spend six billion dollars on an OOPS and their previous year 1 billion dollar profit dives into a negative. That MIGHT work if MS was a small company but it isn't.
MS has always functioned by being able to make boneheaded business move after boneheaded business move because their Windows and Office arms pulled in so much cash they could just burn money and still make a profit at the end.
And this has now stopped. The six billion dollar acquisition is nothing for the OLD MS, they have wasted far more before without falling into a loss. What has changed?
Has MS been overloaded with to many loss making ventures OR have their cash cows stopped generating free cash to burn?
Oh MS isn't going to go bankrupt tomorrow or anytime soon but something has drastically changed in the tech landscape. Now it is Apple that has more cash then it knows what do with and MS that is going to have to start watching the bottom line.
Tech giants come and go (Atari) and some hang on in different forms (IBM). It is just that when it comes to history we tend to think that recent events are immune to it. Shocking prediction: It is not impossible for Apple to one day be reduced to an irrelevant company again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since Ballmer took over, he has quadrupled the net profit of an already large and mature company (~$5.5B to $23.5B) and returned over $175B in dividends to shareholders. Question his strategies all you want (and there is certainly room for criticism), but objectively speaking, he has done very well.
n/t
I wish I could say I feel sorry for them. Only I don't. Not at all. That is all.
Meh.
And how many Windows 7 licenses have been issued to date? 600 million? Different markets, different sales slopes. iPhones don't replace PCs for the overwhelming majority.
Also, check your numbers.
It is because there are so many products without windows operating system tax. There was a time when it was not possible to purchase computer hardware without paying a portion to Microsoft. I've had to pay microsoft four times for a product I never used. Ive been buying windows over and over again just to purchase a PC on which I can run Linux. However, the manufacturers would never give me the rebate for the operating Microsoft windows operating system I never used. Although it is clearly written in the EULA that I can get a refund... microsoft just kept getting paid by me for providing absolutely nothing. I am happy to see Microsoft slowly reduced to only making money for the actual service they provide. I hope I never have to give Microsoft another dime in my lifetime and I will not forget the hardware vendors who were too weak to stand up to Microsoft and issue the refund that they promised me I would receive. I am referring to HP and Asus. I will avoid buying from these companies ever again because of their desire to serve Microsoft... although I suspect all computer hardware vendors are just as guilty.
Phones and tablets don't have nice enough screens for serious work and require a slew of peripherals turning them into badly thought out laptops/PCs with docking stations even if they did. Unlike any of the above.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Laptops 20-25 years ago didn't have nice enough screen for serious work and needed a slew of peripherals....
Desktops 25-30 years ago didn't have enough RAM or CPU for serious work and had permanent design problems which would prevent them from every multitasking well enough....
How do you plan on grafting a 15 inch screen on a 5 inch device?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Most likely the 5 inch devices projects or has an interface that is very dynamic and predicative. You don't have a 15 inch screen. The same way that laptops don't have the same hardware as desktops did.
Laptop and desktop screens are of the same order of magnitude in diagonal size, smartphones, no.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
There are 3 major screen ratios on the desktops: 4x3, 16x10, 16x9.
But that's not what I meant. What I meant was that the screens would act different, use an entirely different approach like project onto another surface. Look at the way small monitors act in Microsoft view of the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a6cNdhOKwi0