Don't think Microsoft is down for the count
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Also: Digital cameras are the hottest gift for 2004. [News.com Extra]
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Bad reviews won't hurt Vista. Neither will the Mac. Or Linux.
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That's not all. Microsoft also has new tools geared to help cut costs of managing corporate data.
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(InfoWorld) - Bill Gates sold over 20 million shares of Microsoft Corp. stock last month, with just around 2 million of the shares affected by global stock market turmoil. The company chairman sold nearly 4 million shares of Microsoft stock in the last three days of February, including 1.87 million shares last Monday, 990,000 shares on Tuesday, and 1 million shares on Wednesday, according to filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Tuesday share sale coincided with one of the worst days global stock markets have seen in years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 416 points on the day to end at 12,216. Microsoft dropped 4.1 percent on the day to end at US$27.87. The company is part of the Dow index. Market watchers blame the global equities turmoil on everything from a sell-off in Shanghai shares to fears of an end to the carry-trade, a term referring to Japan. For years, investors have been able to borrow money in Japan for nearly free because the nation has maintained near-zero interest rates. Borrowers have then taken that money and invested it elsewhere, including in global stock and precious metals markets. The fear is that Japan may start hiking interest rates, causing investors to sell assets bought using their borrowed yen to repay their obligations. Japan has maintained low interest rates for years, a measure aimed at bolstering its economy. No one has blamed the technology sector for the sell-off, but share sales by major figures do attract attention from people trying to gauge the direction markets might take. Gates is considered an insider due to his position at Microsoft, and therefore has to file notices to the SEC when he sells shares, leaving a public record of transactions. He collected over half a billion dollars from the February share sale, according to the SEC filings. The filings do not say why Gates sold the shares. After the share sale, however, he remains the largest shareholder in Microsoft with 917.5 million shares, or around 9.2 percent of shares outstanding.
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IT has never been able to prove it's true value to the business, and as such it is treated as a cost center, which is the first thing to get cut in poorly run companies. But with Web 2.0 booming, all the assumptions that you hold about IT should be put on notice: change is in the air. Web 2.0 companies have had to grow their own technology for economic functionality. Free means crap right? Wrong. How many of you keep Yahoo! Mail running on your BlackBerry's along with Exchange because you know Exchange will be down sooner or later?
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Microsoft has filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - and it looks like the Redmond giant could be in for a lean year ahead, even going as far as to hint that Linux and other open-source rivals might be to blame.
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It's not necessarily time to sell when a company rolls out the pink slips.
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Ziff Davis - Fresh out of its &#36;20 million settlement with Microsoft, the company says it "won't be forced into a cut-rate IPO by a fickle stock market." Instead, it plans to wait until conditions improve.
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A new report from independent warranty provider SquareTrade has found that the failure rate of an Xbox 360 is not as high as critics would have you believe, but it is still much higher than the official number from Microsoft.
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Microsoft may end up having to raise the amount it is willing to pay for Yahoo if the software company&#39;s stock continues to drop while Yahoo&#39;s continues to rise.In the week since&#160;Microsoft made its surprise bid for Yahoo, the price Microsoft is willing to offer the Internet company has dropped by nearly 7 percent as Microsoft&#39;s share price has fallen. In the meantime, Yahoo&#39;s shares have risen in value, trading at nearly the $31 per share Microsoft was willing to pay, making the company potentially worth a higher asking price and the offer vulnerable to higher bids.Microsoft announced its offer to acquire Yahoo on Feb. 1, saying it would pay $31 for half of Yahoo&#39;s outstanding shares and 0.9509 of a Microsoft share for the other half. Microsoft&#39;s half-cash/half-stock offer to Yahoo was valued at about $44.6 billion at the time it was made.The stock half was based on the $32.60 Microsoft share price at the end of Thursday, the day before the deal was announced last Friday. Yahoo&#39;s share price at the close of market on Jan. 31 was $19.18. The cash half of the deal was $22.3 billion, which, when considering Microsoft agreed to pay $31 per share, is based on half of Yahoo&#39;s outstanding shares being 719,354,838.Microsoft has not publicly said what number of outstanding shares it has based its offer price on. In its form 10-Q filed Nov. 9, 2007, Yahoo&#39;s outstanding shares as of Oct. 31, 2007, were 1,336,444,034. However, cutting that number in half and multiplying it by Microsoft&#39;s $31 per-share offer adds up to $20.7 billion, not the $22.3 billion in cash Microsoft is offering.By Friday afternoon, Microsoft&#39;s share price was down about 12 percent at $28.40. Based on that price and assuming that 719,354,838 is the other half of Yahoo&#39;s outstanding shares -- and then factoring in the $22.3 billion cash offer -- the amount of the bid stands at $41.7 billion.Microsoft&#39;s stock is likely down due to its offer for a number of reasons, said a financial analyst who was interviewed Friday and asked not to be named. Investors may not be happy with the money Microsoft is willing to pay for Yahoo, and&#160;strategic questions surrounding how the companies will pull off a merger&#160;successfully also are driving the stock down.Moreover, the deal is expected to dilute Microsoft&#39;s earnings in fiscal 2009 and perhaps even in fiscal 2010, so the company&#39;s earnings predictions likely will come down, the analyst said.On the other hand, Yahoo&#39;s stock has been buoyed by speculation there could be other, higher bidders for the company now that Microsoft has shown its hand. Yahoo stock has risen nearly 34 percent since the deal was announced; on Friday afternoon it was trading at nearly $29, which is only slightly lower than the current per-share for the stock half of Microsoft&#39;s offer.Microsoft has declined to comment about whether it will adjust its offer so that the final amount of the deal will be the original $44.6 billion offered. The cash half for the time being remains the same, sources close to the company said Friday. However, this could change in last-minute dealings if Microsoft&#39;s stock continues to lose value while Yahoo&#39;s rises, and other companies offer competitive bids for Yahoo in the meantime.
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As earnings reports rolled in from technology bellwethers, including Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, and Motorola, worries about the economy continued to overshadow good news this week.The fourth quarter of 2007 was strong for IT sales, but a downturn in the U.S. economy, which many analysts fear is slipping into recession, is undermining investor confidence in the sector. Share prices of technology companies have dropped since the start of the year, with the Nasdaq Composite Index sinking to pre-2007 levels.Microsoft provided some cheer Thursday, reporting a strong quarter for core products such as Windows Vista and Office 2007. Revenue for the quarter increased 30 percent year over year to $16.37 billion.Just as important as many market observers fear the U.S. is entering a recession that will affect technology, Microsoft also raised its forecast for its fiscal year, which ends June 30. Noting that Office and video game sales are doing better than expected, the company said it expects revenue for its fiscal year in the range of $59.9 billion to $60.5 billion. Three months ago, the forecast was $58.8 billion to $59.7 billion.The report, however, provided only a momentary uptick in Microsoft shares and the Nasdaq, even though other news on the software front was good.Enterprise database vendor Sybase, for example, said Thursday that it had its first billion-dollar sales year in seven years, helped by a 15 percent jump in revenue for the fourth quarter to $295.2 million. What&#39;s more, its forecast for this quarter remains strong.&quot;We have a balance in our product portfolio and a balance geographically as well,&quot; said company Chief Marketing Officer Raj Nathan.Though Sybase has a stronghold in the financial vertical market -- a sector that is in trouble -- Nathan pointed out that the company is strong in the telecom arena as well, does about 50 percent of its business outside the U.S., and is developing new analytics products that will help financial companies manage risk and do program trading.The company was one of the few that ended the week on a happy note with its share price increasing by $0.56 to close Friday at $27.44.Other companies did not fare so well, as investors jumped on any scrap of bad news.&#160;Apple got hit hard even though it reported quarterly revenue of $9.6 billion, a whopping 35 percent year-over-year increase. Investors were spooked about slowing iPod sales and a weak forecast for this quarter. iPod shipments of 22.1 million were about 10 percent below what had been expected.Apple shares plunged, dropping from $161.36 last Friday to $130.01 this Friday.Motorola had a rough week, reporting Tuesday an 84 percent plunge in income for the fourth quarter&#160;to $100 million and warning that its market-share losses would continue as the U.S. market -- the company&#39;s cell-phone stronghold -- continues to slump until next year. Company shares dropped $2.27 to hit $10.05 Wednesday on the news, and stayed below $11 through the week.&quot;Management&#39;s view of [a] recovery being a 2009 event pushes the recovery further past the horizon most investors are willing to hear at this point,&quot; said Citigroup Global Markets in a research report.Nokia, with hit products and a strong presence in Asia, on Thursday reported a 44 percent rise in profit for the fourth quarter, to &#8364;1.84 billion ($2.7 billion), on a 34 percent sales increase. A slump in U.S. sales was more than offset elsewhere. Nokia shares jumped Thursday on the news, rising $4.05 to close at $36.48 -- and then fell right back down Friday after IDC issued a report that suggested Nokia&#39;s confidence in 2008 was misplaced.In an economy that has investors focusing on the bad news, it&#39;s going to take some evidence of strong sales in the current quarter to bring confidence -- and tech share prices -- back up to where they were. The Nasdaq finished 2007 up by 9.8 percent, but in the first four weeks of this year, last year&#39;s gain has been wiped out with the index closing Friday almost 300 points down from the end of December.
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Take that, Apple Microsoft reported fiscal second-quarter earnings that surpassed Wall Street's already lofty expectations, as sales of PCs and Xboxes soared. The company also forecast future results that met or beat analysts' outlook.â¦
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Strange that it should take so long for something like this to happen. After all, it&#39;s been years since those of us using Microsoft&#39;s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows OS have had to put up
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You might think the folks at Microsoft (MSFT) have bigger fish to fry than a tiny Bay Area startup named ThinkFree. The company, which offers Web-based word-processing and spreadsheet programs, counts about 60,000 active users, none of whom even pay for the service yet.
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Microsoft posted a record $16.4 billion in revenue during the company's second business quarter, shattering its previous record by $2 billion. The software giant also blew away Wall Street expectations by recording a 92 percent rise in quarterly earnings in comparison with the year-earlier period.
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InfoWorld - Despite its CEO&#39;s claims that Microsoft eventually will trump Google to be number one in online search revenue, the company&#39;s online business is &quot;massively underperforming&quot; against the competition, according to a leading financial analyst.