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Class-action Suit Filed Against Microsoft Over Surface Write Off
New submitter used2win32 writes with news that at least one investor is unhappy with the Surface inventory write off, claiming that Microsoft mislead investors who purchased stock during Q2 and Q3 by not announcing just how slow inventory was moving at the time "The class action lawsuit claims false and misleading information regarding sales performance of Windows RT based tablets. Microsoft has earned a U.S. $900 million write off and a market share of less that 1% to show for its Windows RT endeavors. Asus, Lenovo, HP, Samsung and HTC discontinued their models leaving Dell as the only OEM producing a Windows RT tablet."
Stockholders win the lawsuit and each get 10 bucks. Microsoft stock takes a huge hit. Stockholders lose a lot more than 10 bucks.
Nevermind, I forgot about the lawyers. The lawyers always win.
That's what they get for making buying decisions based upon the hype in the business media.
For example: CNBC's commentators have been beating the BUY MSFT drum for months.
It is unquestionable that Microsoft's compromise by the US government has threatened Microsoft's position in the global marketplace. There may not be an obvious reflection of this damage right now, but things are in motion even now to move away from Microsoft products all over the world. In the past, when governments and business sought to move away from Microsoft, they were drawn back in with special pricing or other deals. And specifically, when the initiatives to move away were pushed by specific individuals, those individuals found themselves attacked and discredited in some way. And when the initiatives were a matter of policy or law, such as a requirement to favor ISO standards compliance products, the Microsoft had set about changing law, policy or forcing through new ISO standards which aren't even being complied with.
None of these tactics are expected to work against the current cause for Microsoft mistrust.
A near $1 billion write off. That would put most companies out of business, and even Microsoft can't keep taking losses like that.
Windows 8 is under-performing, people are pulling out of making Windows Phones, the XBone is facing a lot of backlash, their own tablet is becoming a huge flop, and the hardware makers are deciding they want to focus on other things.
Increasingly it's looking like Microsoft is asleep at the switch and just assuming they'll keep selling as much as they always have.
Either they need to start fixing some fundamentals, or Microsoft is going to face some serious long-term problems.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Were clearance priced / firehouse sold. I'll buy one for $99.00 I need something new to hack on and try to get android/linux running on.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Typical sue-happy mentality of the USA: My bad judgement is your fault.
If these people had made money with the stock, do you think they'd be offering to pay Microsoft part of their profits?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I've always wondered... let's say the court finds for the plaintiffs. Shouldn't the current shareholders then be able to sue for the loss of investment from the company having to pay off the past shareholders?
When does it end?
"A drooling imbecile and his money soon go separate ways?" Seriously, if they hadn't been softed by Microshaft, they surely would've been by somebody else... :p
In addition, win8 was universally panned by everyone PRE RELEASE!.
Could they not see that the ARM version... RT, meant "Really Terrible"?
Silence is a state of mime.
The complaint alleges that Microsoft's first quarter 2013 financial reports were false and misleading. Much of $900 million write down they acknowledged
in the second quarter should have been included in the first quarter statements, they say. If it's true that Microsoft executives knew about the problem and
concealed it in from the investors / potential investors (the owners of the company), that's unlawful, as it should be. That's a fraud on people trying to save
for retirement.
The lawyers will take half the money, so people who were victims of the fraud won't recoup their loss, but punishing fraudulent behavior may tend to
discourage Microsoft and other companies from perpetrating similar lies in the future.
Of course it'll be up to the judge or jury to decide if Microsoft actually did know about the problem by the end of March, in such a way that concealing it
in the first quarter reports mislead investors.
I've always wondered... let's say the court finds for the plaintiffs. Shouldn't the current shareholders then be able to sue for the loss of investment from the company having to pay off the past shareholders?
In theory the accountants lay away a certain amount of cash to deal with various lawsuits. It should just be an adjustment next quarter. The current shareholders are suing over being deliberately mislead, which Microsoft Management is not allowed to do to shareholders. Current shareholders could not sue over that :). In theory they could sack the management.
How's about Microsoft *misled* investors?
if they hadn't been softed by Microshaft, they surely would've been by somebody else... :p
Except it was Microsoft. I would love to see Murderers and Rapists using a similar defence.
Typical sue-happy mentality of the USA: My bad judgement is your fault.
Except that *Judgement* was based on information that is deliberately and intentionally misleading. The Judgement was good.
A bunch of stockholders get to sue MS for not making them enough money.
what about the poor slobs that work there?
Do they deserve money?
Were clearance priced / firehouse sold. I'll buy one for $99.00 I need something new to hack on and try to get android/linux running on.
Why? Why would you promote at anti-consumer device over the many open and cheap ones out there? Why would you help a company that calls you a criminal for doing just that. I remember the xbox and how excited it was to run xbox media center and linux, and hell quake on my TV. Now look at at Microsoft on their latest xbox its the most anti consumer device in existence. Microsoft has gone back on many of its overreacting and draconian practices, but not because people have worked around them, but because they have walked away.
Buy open devices by default.
When it is obvious to the consumers that the execs of a company are arrogant lying assholes acting in bad faith and living in a fantasy world, why would would the rich investors bother to put money in?
All 500 companies in the Fortune 500 have greater than $1B in revenue per Quarter. Sure, $1B is a big deal, but not devastating for any major corporation.
Windows 8 was pretty lackluster, Vista sucked mightily, Millenium Edition was awful. NT, XP, 7 all turned out to be fabulous, stable OSes. Everybody hates a new paradigm in the GUI when they're used to an older one. iOS7 looks like dog shit with a side of cat puke. But we'll all get over it.
MS is super-late to the mobile app party, and they've got nothing to make their handsets a must-have. Android has customization and a huge base of apps, Apple has the comfiness of their one-shop-and-only-one-shop strategy with a huge base of apps. Microsoft has a small fraction of the apps and a market that's small enough that it has few developers. Look at Blackberry - they only had to fall asleep for 2 years to get turned into an also-ran; Microsoft practically left the handset business for 4 years, and came back with essentially a brand new offering that leveraged nothing. And then tried to make a tablet out of that nothing.
Microsoft has the *potential* for market domination - they just can't seem to get their strategy straight. Here's why - 90% of the business application market is still dominated by Windows applications. You HAVE to have windows to run most offices. The possible Win8 strategy to combine tablet and desktop means that convertible devices (which are getting better with Haswell and advanced display tech) are spiralling towards tablet proportions. If you HAD to have a win machine for some things, and it could double as your tablet device, would you really go out and buy TWO devices to carry with you? MS can make that a single device - something that Apple and the Linux market can't (or can't do easily) because their tablet and computer OSes are different. Will MS fuck this up? Yeah, probably, but my expectation is that everything is merging towards combo devices. It's just a matter of who manages to pull it off seamlessly. MS could be set up to be ahead of the curve, or it could squander the opportunity and just plod along.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
why in the world did Microsoft spend so much on such a bad idea? Same with the phones...
The why is actually easy...money, and by money I mean Apple Money + Samsung Money + Google Money + American Express + Old Abusive Monopoly For years. Imagine if Microsoft had 95% share of Phone and Tablet Market share, with everyone else having to use them as their store for electronic goods.
obligatory: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html
Am I dumb and missing the sarcasm? People don't normally carry their iPads everywhere with them, but I know TONS of people who have them. Most don't even bother with their PC's anymore.
In the context of your quote iPads sales are plummeting. Those may be Android tablet Kathleen Sullivan.
These people are like ambulance chasers, and their intended customers are big institutional investors like pension funds and hedge funds. Mom and Pop investors will likely never see a dime. I've been notified about being in-class in two stockholder class action suits like this, and even though I owned the stock in question during the stated period and spent time filling out and filing paperwork in both cases, I was rejected on some capricious technicality both times. A pipefitters local in Ohio and Calpers made out big time, though. Go figure!
I now regard these actions as akin to Samsung suing Apple over the dimensions of rectangles. And let the casual stock buyer beware, as usual. You ain't getting nothing out of this.
If the lawyer fees are limited to 30% of the amount actually distributed to the claimants, it would go a long way in creating an incentive for the lawyers to actually make sure the claimants get some money. Right now, once the settlement is done, they lawyers collect all their money and send a form letter to claimants and move on to the next target.
I think we should make lawyers subject to malpractice laws too when they usurp the right to represent a class of claimants. Due diligence in locating all possible claimants to the class, making sure they all get due compensation, making sure the costs are not inflated etc all should come under malpractice provisions. If the lawyers screw up, the claimants should be able to sue them for malpractice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're required, by law, not to mislead people as to the financials associated with major product lines. They "discover" suddenly that their inventory of one of the most important products they've ever made, key to their future, is worth $1B less than they claimed a couple months ago. The evidence is that they clearly knew that to be the case in time to have reported it in the quarter-ending statements Mar 31 (since basically even those without access to the sales data suspected so). They continued to put lipstick on the pig in public statements all the way to the day they declared they'd just lost $1B, oops.
Why shouldn't they be held accountable?
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Yeah, and none of the "tech folks" I know thought an oversized iPhone was gonna go anywhere, ..."tech folk" on this very website thought a certain device that lacked wireless and had less space than a Nomad
Ironically many "tech folks"(sic) not only predicated the tablet, but looked forward to it, and own many of its ealier iterations. The iPad was the most expected device ever, there were surprises...*price* for one. As for the Mp3 quote. The fact that a prominent "tech folk" thought technology would win over brand is maybe misguided in retrospect, although I took advantage of cheap better alternatives. Ironically he can sleep easy now Android dominated 80% of the smartphone market while Apple cling to 14% that he was right all along.
This was always part of the plan, they took a page directly out of the Xbox playbook, in that they knew the only way to get into the tablet market space was to subsidize their way. The Wintel market has stagnated as a result of maturity, and Microsoft has to do whatever it takes to get into this new market space. Remember back when they missed the boat with the Internet? They licensed Mosaic for millions and then developed and gave away Internet Explorer for free just to fix that problem. Their a bunch of fumbling idiots with unoriginal products, this has always been the case, and their content with this fact. Playing a perfect game is not a requirement for winning at chess.
Android sales are high because everyone starts with the 80 dollar Android tablet and discovers it's junk before they upgrade to something better.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24253413 Sorry those are the latest figures. That is Apple having a sales drop of 14% Year On Year while Samsung rise of 277%, In a market that raised 60% YonY.
The bottom line is Apple need to start competing on more than brand.
The problem is that they are not being accountable. The company is being sued instead of the executives who decided to publish the deficient reports.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But I hate stupid investor lawsuits like this even more.
It is tiresome when a company underperforms to have investors want to sue them for being "mislead".
Last I checked, the stock market was volatile and therefore some care and actual thought should go into where you invest your money.
I mean even if a company blatantly said "Hey, we are going to triple our profits in only one quarter", any investor throwing their money against that claim deserves to lose their shirts in the investment because someone that blindly invests money based on what the company says is retarded.
"Buyer Beware" applies to stock investments too. If you want to be stupid and only invest based on what the CEO of a company says once a quarter, then you forfeit the right to be upset when the company underperforms.
With Microsoft specifically, its stupid to sue Microsoft because Microsoft's stock has been "flat" for over 5 years, hovering around $25 - $30. So what you lost a few dollars per share this quarter? I would be more upset if I had bought Apple at $700 and it dropped 300 points in less than 2 quarters, but then nobody is suing Apple now for the fucked up leadership demonstrated by Tim Cook. I mean when you think of it, no other CEO exists in history that loses 300 stock points in under a year and STILL remains CEO.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
This is a common con in the USA. Lawyer partners with dishonest citizen (who will rake in a large chunk of the settlement via a pay-off from the lawyer) to head a "class action lawsuit". Like patent trolls, the legal action will pitch the settlement low enough to make it likely their target will choose to settle, rather than fight an expensive defense in court. The suckers that join the class action after the fact will 'earn' a voucher for some money off their next purchase from the company targeted. The lawyer, and his citizen partner who started the whole affair, will share in an actual significant CASH settlement.
Microsoft would obviously win in court if it bothered to fight. But since the lawyer and his partner will be bought off with a significant chunk of one million dollars+, and the suckers that join the suit gain a voucher for 25% off their next purchase of Windows or whatever, what incentive does Microsoft have to fight?
investors who purchased stock during Q2 and Q3
Investors didn't know RT was going to be a dog by this time? What's the matter with them? Don't they read Slashdot?
Have gnu, will travel.
And you'll find another million unsold Surface tablets stacked below. Ballmer is the Larry Summers of the business world - a genius in his own mind but never right about anything.
I can't believe anyone could look at the price tag of the Surface and expect it to sell. If you bought MS stock in 2Q or 3Q of last year, you knew or "should have known" that the Surface was going to flame out in a big way. I called this one before the price was announced - I said unless it cost about the same as a comparable laptop with a bigger screen, it would fail badly. And when the price came out, anyone could have predicted it would fail. I don't think the Surface's failure would materially impact MS's overall business and long-term stock price (unless you were buying the stock to sell in less than a year).
There's fraud and then there is the usual behavior of MBAs. Microsoft is clearly a company run by MBAs and not the original engineering types. With engineering types deceitful behavior would not be expected and thus would be unexpectedly fraudulent. But with MBAs they will twist any statistic until it bleeds thinking that if they can spreadsheet it then it becomes reality.
This creates many amusing situations such as MBA types issuing Mortgage backed bonds based on mortgages issued to people with such bad credit that they usually missed their very first mortgage payment. It is the typical MBA's difficult relationship with the truth that resulted in GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) limiting their truth distorting ways.
So any investor that invests in an MBA dominated company should know that they are dealing with a den of thieves who have degenerated into Bottom Line dominated monsters. So the only change that I would ask is that stock ticker symbols come with a super-script that tells you what percentage of the upper management has an MBA. (or used to be in real-estate / used car sales)
Rename it Windows CE Caveat Emptor
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
This is the problem with investors that read financial magazines and political news and company press releases and reports. Just pick up the fucking product they make and use it. That's all I need to know about where a company is going and that's at least a 6 month jump on any real results and real reports, etc. But no, mister clever investor knows everything with his 6 monitors and a dozen paid news tip conglomeration feeds. This guy should be suing himself for being such an idiot and get a real job. The same goes for anyone who invested in Facebook or Apple lately. They can waaahhh all the way to the homeless shelter for all I care because they deserve it for not having one clue about the actual industry they're putting money into.
MS executives knew quite well that MS was dying (even back then), and they needed to do something. The Windows 8 family was "something", thus they did it.
And there are always a lot of people that get it wrong about MS products (except for Windows 8), so it is easy to dissmiss anybody that says that there is doom ahead.
Rethinking email
I recently got to watch a MS rep doing a presentation about the awesomeness of Win8, and he really seemed to believe it was all that. The Redmond campus can be quite a bubble. I recently switched to Mac, and there are things I miss from Win7...most of which have been tossed in Win8. I still use a lot of MS products because our enterprise uses a lot of MS, and there are some solid reasons for that. But talking about the "MS experience" for an individual user...it's just not there.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
you gamble on stocks you lose.... nothing to see here.. move along please
Balmer is that you?
Every time I tab to this story, someone keeps untabbing me!
http://au.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-comments-2013-6
They failed to tell me how low the chances of winning is.
Then after I stopped buying tickets, the jackpot was won by someone else.
hoping RT will be flying off the shelves --- well, you got what you've deserved.
is the infinitive or present tense.
Misled is the past participle or past tense. Not to be confused with the noun lead. So you cannot say "they were mislead", it's "they were misled". Some people are having difficulties here.
Can I has grammar? Past tense of lead is led. Microsoft was misleading them, or Microsoft has misled them.
(...and I'm talking 10years+) Linux and Mac OS enjoy such great hardware longevity because they're running 'nix kernels. What Microsoft needs to do, and I say this in all honesty, is to develop future versions of Windows either in a FreeBSD flavor as Apple did with OSX, or a Linux type kernel. The Microsoft ecosystem is horribly out-moded, they would be miles ahead to innovate in this way, and port their stuff over to the new/old architecture. Also because they are intimately familiar (used loosely) with how MS applications run, they would be positioned to not only make their old stuff backwards compatible, but also make them 'nix compatible,and corner the market. If Apple were to release their restriction on Apple-only hardware installations, they'd corner the desktop market in less than 2 years. Sad to say it, but Ballmer is not an innovator, he's just an excitable speaker.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.