Microsoft presented its financial results for the past quarter, and Ars analyses them. “Redmond sees revenues drop both quarterly and year-over-year. But its earnings per share are up a bit from last quarter, suggesting it has found a way to manage the pain. Online Services and Entertainment both felt serious hurt.”
The Microsoft press release was much clearer for me. It has the headline figures in the first paragraph without the waffle.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY09/earn_rel_q4_09.mspx
… for all those wondering about the cheap and ‘scarce’ Windows 7 Pre-orders.
the number of preorders available was based on the number of beta testers in a specific country.
just to keep things in perspective, I read last week in inforamtionweek that the ROS (operating margin, return on sales) of oracle has reached 50+% (from the link provided in the first comment, microsoft is around 30%), even though their revenue dropped, of course microsoft is in many more projects (more diversified too)
It’s only normal for them to loose share/money in this quarter, w7/o2010 are commming and they know it (it’s a “cycle”) so I don’t really see a problem in these numbers especially when I see microsoft is cutting failed project here and there in order to clean things out a little
Edited 2009-07-24 17:37 UTC
It will be really hard for MS to adjust to an open source world. On the desktop side I think OEMs are likely to use Linux/Chrome OS to dump Windows 7 prices and on the server side Canonical and Red Hat have very good offers for people who want to pay. On the mobile side it seems MS has already lost to Apple/Android.
Competing with free (Android, Chrome, Ubuntu etc.) is hard, even for MS.
Windows will still be a the preferred OS for gamers and business for some time, but don’t see how MS can create a buzz around Office or its cloud services or other products.
The search and entertainment departments still lose boatloads of money and that is not likely to change, because they have to offer other browsers in the biggest market and competition from Sony and Nintendo won’t go away.
I wouldn’t say its suck to be Steve or Bill, they are way way too richt for that, but they probably have seen better days.
Edited 2009-07-25 13:37 UTC