 | Microsoft did not meet their expectations. Both the top and bottom line were worse than predicted. The most spectacular failure is the Surface RT which had to be written off with 900 000 000 $ The stocks took a 12 % dive and MS lost values in the amount of an entire Yahoo. This is the biggest fall since the dot.com bubble burst. Microsoft's strategy of abandoning the PC and go for the phones and tablets - has not succeeded. |
Analysts say that the top year for PC's might have been 2011 and that tablets and phones would fill the role of the traditional PC after that.
It is clear that PC sales are down - it is not equally clear why PC- sales are down.
It might well be that the business customers cannot do anything with Windows 8 and that they simply do not want to replace their keyboards with a screen full of finger marks.
They might want to buy a PC - but not one with reduced functionality so it only can run Windows 8.
The business customers might feel that MS has neglected them for the private consumer market , and thereby has neglected their biggest market.
Windows is loosing profitability and is down 63 % which indicates increased competition - and reflects that people do not want Windows 8. Office remains the big money machine.
"Servers and Tools" are also going well and showing a development that competitors like IBM Oracle and SAP cannot match.
But then they are specialists. This area is also under heavy pressure from Linux - since there is no two ways about it that all the supercomputers in the world are Linux servers.
This is a quality stamp that Microsoft does not have.
This could be the end of the MS-Dinosaur aera and Microsoft needs to evolve and have started the process.
MS has not been able to follow Google's creativity and innovation and they have not been able to keep up with Apple.
Still they have stubbornly tried to dictate the market as if they still were the driving force of computing ("cross licensing" aka get payed for the work of others).
This has made Android the biggest income source in their phone division - even if Microsoft had nothing to do with the development of it.
It is hard to tell if Prism has had any effect on the stock market - the market seems to react negatively on the figures presented.