$492 million dollar loss for the quarter

7/19/2012 5:49:38 PM

wow



That's what happens when you make products that people tolerate but don't want.

[Edited on July 19, 2012 at 10:24 PM. Reason : .]

7/19/2012 10:22:52 PM

no, that's what happens when you buy a company for $6B and don't get your money's worth from it

7/19/2012 10:45:21 PM

What did they buy for 6 bil?

7/19/2012 10:58:44 PM

aQuantive in 2007

7/19/2012 11:31:24 PM

I am telling you guys Google could finish them off with a cloud based office suite that actually works well.

For everyone that just needs a basic office environment they need email, a browser, and MS office.

Google already has the first two of those things and they work amazingly, the third is god awful expensive and companies hate to pay for it. The only reason most people need windows is for file storage and to run MS office.

7/20/2012 12:06:48 AM

REDMOND, Wash. — Apr. 19, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $17.41 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2012
REDMOND, Wash. — July 19, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $18.06 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2012.

Is it a decline when that number gets bigger?

[Edited on July 20, 2012 at 4:29 AM. Reason : It was 17.37 for June 2011 for those curious.]

7/20/2012 4:29:30 AM

when what they spend is higher than that number, yes.

7/20/2012 6:58:03 AM

They spent $6.3 billion in cash in 2007 to buy aQuantive and just wrote off $6.2 billion dollars of that investment as worthless. More money down the drain in the Online division.

7/20/2012 6:59:47 AM

This is actually a pretty stellar read on the topic, apologies if its been posted before: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer

They are acutely suffering from being a massive company with no real coherent vision.

Every product of theirs that I've used suffers from some utterly asinine limitation that can only have come out of a project management meeting.

7/31/2012 12:02:40 AM

Quote :

"REDMOND, Wash. — Apr. 19, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $17.41 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2012 REDMOND, Wash. — July 19, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $18.06 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2012. Is it a decline when that number gets bigger? [Edited on July 20, 2012 at 4:29 AM. Reason : It was 17.37 for June 2011 for those curious.]"

How much did they have to spend to make that revenue?

Then with that, what is the difference between the two?

7/31/2012 12:13:30 AM

Quote :

"They are acutely suffering from being a massive company with no real coherent vision. "

Up until about 2 years ago, I would 1000% agree with you. That is no longer the case whatsoever. Now you can argue whether the current vision is a GOOD one, or will be successful, but the touch+cloud vision is here in force.

And I may have said this a year or two ago, but I saw a recent article the reiterated it. Microsoft tends to do well when it's facing stiff competition. Apple, Amazon and Google are all top rate competitors now, and I'm pretty impressed these days watching the company changing from the inside. The sleeping beast has definitely woken up from hibernation.

The product team I worked with for the past 5 years went from shipping every 36 months to 18 months to 6 months to 3 months and now they are literally shipping every 3 weeks. Which has necessitated wholesale Agile adoption. No agilefall, no bullshit political crap. When you move to a service shipping cadence, it's amazing how completely the corporate game falls by the wayside.

[Edited on July 31, 2012 at 12:41 AM. Reason : .]

7/31/2012 12:40:31 AM

Stocks don't generally go UP when companies post a loss, but Microsoft's did because they had a strong quarter despite the huge writeoff that everyone knew was coming. I don't think the loss indicates anything really, besides the fact that Microsoft is pulling out of the online advertising game that isn't as profitable as everyone assumed it would be a few years ago.

Quote :

"Every product of theirs that I've used suffers from some utterly asinine limitation that can only have come out of a project management meeting."

I can say that about pretty much every product from every company.

7/31/2012 12:45:53 AM

outlook.com is pretty nice

7/31/2012 5:47:46 PM

Quote :

"Up until about 2 years ago, I would 1000% agree with you. That is no longer the case whatsoever. Now you can argue whether the current vision is a GOOD one, or will be successful, but the touch+cloud vision is here in force."

Following somebody else isn't having vision friend, its having direction.

8/1/2012 10:57:46 PM

i'm going to start a picket line...


i h8 windows 8

8/2/2012 9:48:01 AM

outlook.com?

8/2/2012 2:39:24 PM

Quote :

"Following somebody else isn't having vision friend, its having direction."

I agree, unless the people you're following are the visionaries. I would argue that's the case now inside the walls here (and no, I'm not talking about Ballmer)

8/2/2012 3:48:32 PM

Nope only one had vision the rest is direction. And windows AOLedition = poop.

8/2/2012 8:02:29 PM

Online advertisers and analytics companies were furious with Microsoft's decision to enable Do Not Track as a default in IE 10. Microsoft announced it's sticking to its guns

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-sticks-to-default-do-not-track-settings-in-ie-10-7000002289/

between outlook.com and this in the last few days, +2 for Microsquish.

[Edited on August 8, 2012 at 8:54 AM. Reason : .]

8/8/2012 8:53:50 AM

wow...gg MS!

8/8/2012 10:06:05 AM

its kind of pointless though since its up to the tracker to accept the request to not be tracked. it would be more impressive if they were pushing down a tracking protection list by default since tpls block ads/cookies/etc... before they are requested from the server.

this is like the old cookie compact privacy stuff which everyone ignored or violated.

8/8/2012 10:56:21 AM

yeah, good point-- this is mostly symbolic in nature, but still gotta give props.

8/8/2012 11:59:35 AM

fuck

i lost cbwilliamson@hotmail.com

I had this since hotmail was the shit in the late 90s.

8/9/2012 6:03:05 PM

I don't get why they didn't migrate everyone on hotmail to outlook.com automatically and autofwd *@hotmail.com to *@outlook.com

seamless, painless, and you get instant, forced adoption.

8/10/2012 11:45:25 AM

^because hotmail addresses were spam farms for years. A person could easily register 10,000 hotmail addresses to themselves. Ever tried creating a new hotmail address lately? You end up with fubatxx17498161@hotmail.com as the only option available.

Starting fresh lets people have a chance to pick names that were long gone on hotmail.

8/10/2012 12:12:01 PM

Quote :

"Ever tried creating a new hotmail address lately?"

lol

8/10/2012 3:47:33 PM

Anyone at MSFT care to comment on the stack ranking?

8/13/2012 9:29:19 AM

^what about it? the vanity fair article is exactly how it works, every employee absolutely hates it and have complained about it consistently at every level of the company since it was introduced.

8/13/2012 6:11:31 PM

I was mainly curious about if it is still in place. I figured if I was reading about it's long since been abolished, but wasn't sure.

8/13/2012 8:15:13 PM

Stack ranking is the most stupid thing that I have every heard of intoday's world. I will now consider leaving MS products since they will never be on par with Android or Apple based on this practice.

8/13/2012 8:18:12 PM

We have the same shit at Cisco.

It's utter crap, even though I've mostly benefited from it. The company as a whole has been on a steady dive ever since it was implemented.

8/13/2012 8:59:30 PM

Not only is it still in place, but it was updated to be even more harsh and strictly enforced a year or two ago. Like Bobby, I've personally benefited from it, but it is not a well liked policy. It basically is the exact opposite of what engineers should have as a reward structure.

8/13/2012 9:59:45 PM

attn: noen or someone else knowledgable...

I'm using Office 13 Preview. How do I get my calendar to show events coming up in the next two weeks? As you can see my calendar is bare because I have nothing scheduled for today but I do have 3 things scheduled in the next two weeks and there's not even a color indication on there for it. I'd like it to list it underneath. Do I just have to convert it to a task everytime?

8/14/2012 11:31:04 AM

^Nope, but it sounds like a great simple Office App you could write (and probably make a good bit of $$ from)

8/14/2012 6:09:42 PM

yeah I can't code.

8/14/2012 8:03:07 PM

Sounds like something simple that should have been included in a well made product.


MS just seems misdirected. Seemingly trying to do too many things at once with no clear unification of design or use.

8/17/2012 2:35:58 PM

I'll just add that I setup Thunderbird and then Mozilla announced that they would no longer be developing work for it, so I decide to give this a try because it's free to try

If I paid for a product like this and something as simple as the calendar hasn't been fleshed out then it's officially not Office worthy

I might have to shell out for Postbox now since I really enjoyed their trial

8/17/2012 2:43:05 PM

The calendar has been fleshed out. Click on the calendar section. You're talking about a personal todo bar.

^^really? With the "modern" ui push, pretty much every product in the company has a pretty unified design language. Yes Microsoft does make a ton of products. But making a blanket statement like "feature x should be in any well made product" is just ignorant . What competitive applications DO have this feature? Because I'm not aware of any that even have a glance able todo panel at all, much less one with roll ahead appointment lists and multi calendar support.

Hell even my infinitely configurable nexus tablet can't give me this view through widgets.

8/17/2012 3:47:35 PM

earlier versions of Outlook have it!

[Edited on August 17, 2012 at 5:30 PM. Reason : at least the last two places I worked at, it did and they would have had either '07 or '10]

8/17/2012 5:29:36 PM

clearly you have nothing scheduled today. working as intended.

8/17/2012 6:24:52 PM

So write an add-in for it. OMG you have options!!!!

8/17/2012 7:08:12 PM

I'm a consumer, not a developer

8/17/2012 7:15:56 PM

Gotcha. Guess I should've read that when you said that above.

Did you send a request to MSFT?

8/17/2012 9:11:52 PM

I hadn't before, but I did just now

i sent that bitch a frowny face, bitches hate frowny faces

[Edited on August 17, 2012 at 11:27 PM. Reason : ]

8/17/2012 11:22:14 PM

In the Outlook preview, am I missing how to show tasks and upcoming appointments on the Calendar page?

It looks like we have to click over to Calendar which is very annoying, old Outlook showed tasks and a few appointments.

10/4/2012 11:58:06 AM

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/microsoft-fails-to-notice-the-death-of-the-pc-posts-record-revenue-figures-instead/

Quote :

"Microsoft fails to notice the death of the PC, posts record revenue figures instead"

LOL

1/24/2013 11:23:17 PM

I think Google is in fucking decline.

They have not come out with anything new or innovative for like ever.

1/25/2013 1:07:07 AM

How's the MSFT narrative these days? http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/27/microsoft-ballmer-retirement

Why would such a successful company force out the CEO? Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, etc CEO ouster next?

8/29/2013 2:17:04 PM

Apple's CEO resigned just a few years ago actually. We'll see how this new guy works out for them.

So far, not good: http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/14/it-has-not-been-a-good-week-to-be-tim-cook/

8/29/2013 2:41:56 PM