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Microsoft Stock Drops 11% In a Day
Taco Cowboy writes with news that Microsoft's stock price dropped over 11 percent yesterday. The selloff was the biggest since 2009, and during the day the price was down more than 12 percent at one point, making it the biggest single day drop since April, 2000. Analysts believe the drop was due primarily to the company missing its quarterly earnings projections in addition to taking a massive, $900 million write-down on unsold Surface RT tablets. "Microsoft’s decline is both a consequence of the changing dynamics of the tech world and the incredible surge in its stock price this year. Shares in the maker of Windows had rallied nearly 30% this year, leaving both the broader stock market and the technology sector in the dust. It was, it seemed, Steve Ballmer’s year. Until Friday. The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units. Being the world’s largest software company, 'over 80% of its revenue and nearly all of its profits continue to be derived by its ubiquitous Windows OS, its server business (Windows Server), and the business division (Office),' according to UBS. And indeed that decline in the PC industry is hurting the company’s bottom line."
If Surface RT is selling so well, why then the price drop? Why the write-off? Why doesn't anyone I know have a Surface RT?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
The zune sold more than a million units in its first year, compared with 35 million IPODs sold in that same span, and yet it is universally considered to have been a failure.
The Surface RT and Surface Pro together sold less than a million units int their first year, while the IPAD sold more than 22 million units in that same period. It sounds to me like the surface and zune fall into the same category of failure...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
What "reports"? Surface RT sales being weak is reported all over the internet. Literally nobody is saying it is selling well at all, including Microsoft themselves.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder. Nokia can't keep this up forever. Other builders don't sell enough units to make it worthwhile to continue to produce units. All of Windows Phone ecosystem sells about as many smartphones as Coolpad. Have you heard of them? No. Nobody talks about Coolpad, but everybody talks about Windows Phone and Nokia.
One fun person to read about these with is Tomi Ahonen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
QuickSilver is your answer. I go a couple of steps further, since I am a very light spotlight user, I remap spotlight to CTRL-OPT-Spacebar, and then map QuickSilver to Cmd-Spacebar, and I don't look back. I'm a keyboard junkie - I also use Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` (the tilde key above the Tab) to move between apps and move between windows of the current app, respectively. Shift will reverse the order on those last two. I also rarely use Expose, and map my F keys to be real F keys. On my MBP I use the Func key to control the brightness and audio if needed.
Personally, Apple made wrong choices with Spotlight. It is both too powerful, and not powerful enough. I have over 10TB of internal disk space, mostly full, and as I develop software, we're talking millions of files of all types, along with a Gb of mail over many years. Spotlight is next to useless systemwide, although it works well enough within Mail. Maybe the real problem is its integration with Finder. Since I'm adept with shell commands, I've never bothered looking any further.
Other than that - the UI works well enough, stays out of my way, and with QuickSilver, I haven't had to change how I work with OS X since the Panther days.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I do a lot of business traveling in Europe on trains, and just about all the passengers are fiddling with some electronic gadget or another. Business folks? Lenovo ThinkPads. Cooler business folks? MacBooks. Regular folks? Andriod tablets and iPads. Folks not wanting to be left out of the gadget party? Samsung Galaxy phones.
I have never seen a Microsoft Surface of any breed or color.
Of course, your mileage may vary. But I would have expected to have seen at least one. The only one I have ever seen, has been in a store.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's obsolete because it has a weaker CPU, a weaker GPU, less RAM and a lower resolution screen than the Nexus 7. It was also released later and costs significantly more.
- Listen to users before releasing Win8, not wait until Win8.1 to start "listening"
Microsoft is only pretending to listen with Win 8.1. It's still 95% the same train wreck Metro interface.
Ahh, you mean like how the iPhone stole from the Palm Treo, HP iPaq and LG Prada.
Yay. Same price as it was in 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. (Split adjusted)
Great investment!
https://www.google.com/finance?q=msft&ei=iyXrUYjTG8LBqAHJnwE
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
it's amazing how people forget that the iphone wasn't at all the first smartphone and that it was a relatively small evolutionary step over something like the palm treo and not a revolutionary epiphany that they get credited with. almost everything that the iphone did, the palm treo could do - up to and including an app store. apple just did it slicker.