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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."
Microsoft has tons of cash and is making more. Nobody thinks they're going out of business this year. The panic is that they clearly have no viable plan for participating in the mobile revolution. They have lost control of the platform.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Writing off almost a billion dollars in a quarter and slashing prices by 33% within the first year of launch isn't a success by any standards.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
HA HA, TIME TO CHANGE THE COMPANY TO HARDWARE AND SERVICES. UH OHHH
Steve SERIOUSLY fucked up hard.
I wonder how long it will take for people to vote to kick him out.
Not only are people NOT buying their hardware, barely anyone is buying their services either.
Meanwhile their OS and Office apps are still the thing that makes them even exist.
And the one thing they depend most on, the business types, THEY SHAFT THEM ENTIRELY WITH THE NEW OS.
Great idea Baldness, great idea. Doing the company proud. And then Technet got killed. Up next, MSDN on the chopping board.
Not to mention Xbone. I seriously thought the whole 180 reversal on the DRM was some sort of reverse bait and switch, "hey, have our shitty product!", everyone hates it, "HAAA, gotcha, here, but seriously, have our less shitty product! We removed the really good features and the really bad features!".
They seriously never done that though, they ACTUALLY designed it like that, and after Don was eliminated from the company floors, that further proves it. And the many thousands to million servers they had for Xbone now being touted for Azure instead probably.
We won't see Microsoft die any time soon, but they will eject the monkey in control if this gets any worse.
Linux will become more popular on the desktop as more games are moving to it, which will take a large chunk of gamers out of their income.
Steam already has a decently large number of games supported now, and it is growing.
People are seeing through Microsofts bullshit, took a while, but finally they are seeing them for what they are.
So the Zune was a huge success as well then, according to you?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
And crappy tablet.
No g3/4 or even GPS?! What kind of crap is that if I cant get directions or weather reports on the road? Metro is not bad but its implementation on the desktop. Taskbars and start menus are really fine with big screens ms. Nothing to fear folks and they work when you have 20 apps and files open. The cell phone UI cant handle this.
MS is still thinking like a monopolists because it worked. Bad release. .. Oh just wait. NT failed, IE failed, xbox failed failed, etc. Because they were ms they just gradually fixed them and monopolized the market later.
Guess what? Those days are done. Apple, Google, Mozilla, and others will eat you for breakfast while you wait for the next version. Look at IE as an example? Gosh darn it hell froze over and IE 10 and soon IE 11 are great browsers now that Google and Mozilla
slapped IE 6 crazy but who cares? People do not feel comfortable picking MS and IE as a brand now. Windows will go the same route.
They really need to try to be better. Not catch up and assume people will use it because its from MS like they did in the
http://saveie6.com/
Don't worry; Steve Ballmer's reorg will fix all of this. All of the product groups that analysts used to compare quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year have disappeared. Products have been shuffled around into new groups organized around "engineering." The upshot is that money-losing products like Bing are now going to be lumped in with big breadwinners like Office. You won't be able to look at the Xbox and Online Services divisions anymore and say "they lose money." All those failures will be hidden in the new structure. Without an instance like Microsoft writing down almost a billion dollars on the Surface RT disaster, it will be harder for anyone to gauge how it's doing, at least for the next few quarters. Problem solved!
Breakfast served all day!
heh? Surface RT was a failure plain and simple. The fact that users are happy does not prove anything. People will jump into cacti because they are happy to do it. Don't believe me? Head over to youtube and search for cacti guy jump. My point is that everybody loves products that other people hate, that is called statistics. Whether or not it is successful depends on adoption rate.
Case in point, desktop linux, not happening. I like desktop linux and use it all the time, but that don't make it a success even though I am happy. On the other hand server side Linux is a huge success and now getting to the point where people only release for Linux. EG Redis... Sure I can use it on Windows, sort of, kind of, maybe.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I think Win8 slowed PC sales. It's just anecdotal; but you hear people say they were at the store and didn't want to buy a machine unless it came with Win7. Otherwise, they're waiting to see if MS can get rid of the New Coke OS and replace it with Classic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The traditional PC market has had 5 consequential quarters of decline. This is Microsofts core market, where it makes much of its money.
On top of that Microsoft has essentially failed to gain any traction in the the new growth markets of smartphones/tablets.
So it is understandable that like the PC market, which is adjusting to some new smaller number of annual sales, Microsoft which makes it's income from those sales will adjust down to some new lower level of earnings, and a correspondingly lower stock price.
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
By what standard did it sell well? Maybe Microsoft was moving some units at first, but months after launch we kept hearing the same figure for the number of units sold. A month would go by and someone would quote the same figure, again. That's not indicative of strong sales. By some channel figures, in Q1 of 2013 Microsoft and its partners moved less than 2 million Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. That's not just Surface RT, not just Microsoft, that's every vendor of Windows tablets combined. Meanwhile, Apple sold nearly 20 million tablets in the same period; one vendor. So I ask again, by what standard has Surface sold "quite well"?
Breakfast served all day!
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.
Metro UI is designed to combine both PC and tablet UI's. So because Microsoft saw that PC sales were declining, they wanted to compete in the tablet space. That was against everything that Slashdot users said back in the day when Metro UI was introduced, and they called it a huge mistake from Microsoft.
Just because M$ had an actual plan doesn't mean that the plan was any good. It was a mistake for M$ to try to force their way into the tablet market. It was doomed to failure. Worse yet, it has continued a long string of M$ screwing its loyal customer base in an ill-advised attempt to convert customers from one market into another. M$ has to learn that it cannot mess with its loyal windows customer base. It cant leverage its existing monopolies for new markets because it is no longer the 800Lb gorilla of all things tech. The more they pull crap like this, the more rabid haters they create. How many people will put up with a fair amount of inconvenience just to run open-office. How many people were willing to switch to Firefox when it offered only marginally better value over IE (both were free after all). A large number of people (myself included) switched to these other platforms and solutions for no other reason than because we hate M$. I do still run some M$ products because the alternative is not really practical, but every time a good enough alternative comes along, I switch away from yet another M$ product. How many others are out there like me?
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone? MS completely lacks anything close to that kind of vision or innovation. They wait for others to innovate, see if its making money, then jump in and try to grab marketshare. That worked in the '90's. It doesn't work now. A moron could see the RT was DOA.
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.
The real problem, at least with the Prism spying, is not on your computer. Well, it might be if you run Windows (the idea of secret backdoors seems more real than ever now), but that's beside the point. It's the fact that the government has chosen to parasitize its chosen host companies directly, right on the Internet, installing splitters right at the source: between the host company and its ISP, with top-secret government-controlled datacenters in between for long-term storage of all of their traffic... everything that goes in, everything that goes out. The only way this can be avoided is by choosing services whose providers are *not* in the United States and therefore not subject to this FISA court crap. I have been running Linux since 2006, but trust me: Linux is no protection against this. The government has penetrated the Internet itself, right where it counts: at the pipes of all the major U.S.-based world-wide communications providers' connections.
The key difference is in attitudes:
Apple: Likes to take risks - "We can grow into new markets and augment our OS strategy."
Microsoft: We live in fear - "We can't grow into new markets because that will cannibalize our existing Windows+Office sales!"
It isn't Computer Science - it is basic business planning & execution with the focus on User Experience. Something Microsoft has been terrible at for the past 10 years.
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!
There is one other thing they could of done.
* Instead of sitting on their ass throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks like changing the UI in Vista and again in Windows 8 for now good reason, they should of taken a cue from Apple who built and _expanded_ upon a good foundation -- every OS X release from 10.0 to 10.7 (for the most part) just got better, more polished, faster (!), added neat features, and kept it consistent and simple.
Microsoft had 10 years to TRULY advance the state of the UI by removing the stupid close button being placed next to the maximized button, by recognizing people want to have TWO (or more) spatial groups in the task bar for the SAME program, by removing the screen-wide title bar that just wastes screen vertical real estate, by providing an API so users can skin the UI, by allowing users to choose an option LESS then "smaller" 100% UI scaling in Control Panel Display, by polishing the UI, allow people to pick a ZERO pixel window border to maximize screen usage, by getting feedback from UI & UX experts along with power users for how they could make the computer EASIER _and_ more FASTER, etc.. i.e. It only took Microsoft how many years to allow people to add custom favorite folders in the Explorer view ??
People want 1) consistency, 2) features, 3) simplicity. In that order.
The fact that Microsoft constantly has to re-arrange & re-name almost every element in the control panel every other version of Windows tells me they don't know what they hell they are doing with UI - namely respecting and building a positive Out-of-theBox User Experience. That is why the majority no one gives a shit about Microsoft & their products anymore. They don't understand hardware, they don't understand software, they don't understand user experience. Apple is by no means perfect but at least they seem to (or used to) understand the basics extremely well. Microsoft has NEVER understood UI.
Microsoft: Just another me-too company with Apple envy. No one gives a crap about your physical Store. LOL.
For Microsoft to change they need to:
a) learn to be humble
b) acknowledge that they don't understand UI / UX. (proof: Clippy)
c) communicate with people
d) get off their arrogant attitude & stop pushing things down people's throats that people don't want: Zune, WinCE, Windows Phone, Surface, a dozen different versions of Windows, refusing to sell Windows XP for $20, etc.
e) treat customers with respect
Sadly, that will never happen. Microsoft will die a slow death of becoming irrelevant all the while wondering where the fuck they went wrong.
I know a guy that has a zune and he loves it. Only one guy but hey, that's one happy customer.
Me, too! I didn't know you knew Glenn.
You accidentally included your response inside the quote.
He's using RT. Proper closing tags are only available with the Pro.
I did go to Youtube and search for "man cacti jump."
The internet delivers as promised.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone?
Creating new products on your own without having your users to ask for everything is great -- ultimately, they won't know if they like it until they can get an opportunity to use it a while and see if it helps them be more efficient or makes life easier for them. A product that has enormous benefits for you, can still make you feel very uncomfortable or annoyed at first, before you have gotten used to it: change is hard.
Apple had an advantage with the iPhone. Noone had ever used a touch screen smart phone before, so people had no established patterns; Apple as first creator could essentially define how people do things on the platform. Once people are used to those ways change is harder and likely to be resisted.
Apple has made no fundamental changes to the iPhone, since the 3GS. Yes, they made a few incremental improvements here and there --- notification center, multitasking, push notifications; lock screen changes; stacks of apps.
However, they've made no major user interface changes -- if you were familiar with the iPhone 3GS; you will be pretty darned comfortable with the iPhone 5 and beyond, because there's no major changes to the way you work.
I dare say the number of "controversial" changes were relatively small on the face of it --- things like replacing the Google Maps app.... Yes virginia, you do have to get your maps from a different place now, and it kind of sucks, but noone's switching platforms over something so minor as that.
On the other hand.... Metro isn't minor. It's not minor not because it can't be minor, but Microsoft has chosen to present Metro in such a way that there is no way to circumvent it --- the difference is a major impact, and likely to move users to different platforms; That is, if those other platforms provide a more true traditional Windows experience than Windows 8 does.
If Microsoft wants to dabble in completely new OSes, that's great, as long as they keep providing upgrades and support for businesses using their most popular products, so that they are not forced to switch platforms.
That's not how Microsoft's treating Metro; it's "The next version of Windows", that you have to move to, whether you like to or not, because we're not going to be selling Windows 7 anymore, or providing updates anything like it.