Apple
Microsoft reports earnings: it’s a bloodbath
By Jim DalrympleJuly 24, 2009, 6:52 am PT
Instead of worrying about phone calls from Apple concerning its “Laptop Hunter” ad campaign, maybe Microsoft executives should worry more about their business.
Microsoft on Thursday announced its fourth quarter and year-end fiscal results. It was messy. The company announced revenue of $13.1 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2009. That represents a 17 percent decline from the year ago quarter.
It gets worse.
Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s CFO said operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34, respectively. That represents declines of 30 percent, 29 percent and 26 percent, respectively, when compared with the same period last year.
For the fiscal year, Microsoft reported revenue of $58.44 billion, a 3 percent decline from the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the year were $20.36 billion, $14.57 billion and $1.62, which represented declines of 9 percent, 18 percent and 13 percent respectively.
Compared to Apple
As luck would have, Apple also reported its earnings this week. Let’s have a look, shall we.
Apple reported revenue of $8.34 billion and a quarterly profit of $1.23 billion. That’s a 12 percent increase in revenue and a 15 percent increase in profits over the same period last year.
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13 Responses to “Microsoft reports earnings: it’s a bloodbath”
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Microsoft reports earnings: it’s a bloodbath
By Jim DalrympleJuly 24, 2009, 6:52 am PT
Instead of worrying about phone calls from Apple concerning its “Laptop Hunter” ad campaign, maybe Microsoft executives should worry more about their business.
Microsoft on Thursday announced its fourth quarter and year-end fiscal results. It was messy. The company announced revenue of $13.1 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2009. That represents a 17 percent decline from the year ago quarter.
It gets worse.
Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s CFO said operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34, respectively. That represents declines of 30 percent, 29 percent and 26 percent, respectively, when compared with the same period last year.
For the fiscal year, Microsoft reported revenue of $58.44 billion, a 3 percent decline from the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the year were $20.36 billion, $14.57 billion and $1.62, which represented declines of 9 percent, 18 percent and 13 percent respectively.
Compared to Apple
As luck would have, Apple also reported its earnings this week. Let’s have a look, shall we.
Apple reported revenue of $8.34 billion and a quarterly profit of $1.23 billion. That’s a 12 percent increase in revenue and a 15 percent increase in profits over the same period last year.
Please take a minute to Tweet, Like, or Share this post with your friends.
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Discussion 13 comments so far
13 Responses to “Microsoft reports earnings: it’s a bloodbath”
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I know that, as Apple fanboys, we are enjoying this moment of Microsoft pain. But, it behooves us to remember that Micrsoft’s problems are just one indicator of the problems with the US economy. I am not saying that “what is good for MS is good for the country”, well, yes, I am saying that.
I think that there is a more serious underlying cause to Microsoft problem, other than the economy. It is the advent of competitive office suites such as NeoOffice, OpenOffice that a lot of people have found good enough to replace the much more expensive MSFT Office suite with. Also Cloud computing is not helping in anyway with Google announcing a new operating system to go with it. I suspect that Microsoft business model is technologically under assault and the company will have to innovate its way out of this situation really fast before it gets overtaken by this new development.
“I suspect that Microsoft business model is technologically under assault and the company will have to innovate its way out of this situation really fast”
LOL
Microsoft and Innovation in the same sentence….
Seriously though, MS has a history of cranking out products, each worse than the last, then when the industry is starting to say that they are finally over the hill they drop an XP or Server 2003 that is quite good. Then they live off of that for another half decade. Though W7 is just Vista with improvements (I think of it as Vista SP3) I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a hit. MS is due to knock one out of the park.
And I was thinking what is bad for Microsoft is good for the country. But in this case, for the short term, you’re right.
or maybe it means what Apple is doing successfully – making innovative high quality products – is what the US economy really needs instead. oh, and manufacturing them in China.
I think your comments, Dave, are wide of the mark. IBM, Intel and Apple all produced good results despite the poor economy. Microsoft is simply suffering from not being very good – in this case Vista being terrible, doing nothing meaningful in the mobile sphere, not knowing how to grow search and struggling generally in the cloud.
They’re results are bad because they’re not much good at what they do.
“Their results are bad because they’re not much good at what they do.”
Well, ‘not much good’ was true, all along, when results were good. The difference is that people have now seen it — once they had Microsoft’s incompetence so wonderfully demonstrated by Vista, and Microsoft’s arrogance so wonderfully illuminated by them even daring to sell such a pile of rubbish and thinking everyone would just swallow it.
Cancer is good for the economy too.
Why don’t every one get cancer so doctors and
insurance companies can get rich. It would help the
economy.
A little perspective though…
Most Windows users have probably put-off buying anything for the last year because the KNEW Windows 7 was coming and they wanted nothing to do with Vista. I suspect the next quarter’s numbers may look a bit brighter for the turd-burglars in Redmond.
That being said, any sort of “slide” in revenues/sales for MS is a good thing for the entire industry, IMO. They’ve had it too good for too long, and I hope Apple can gain some big ground.
Yahoo sat on their duff for too long as well, and look what happened. Someone finally came along and kicked them in the crotch. They’ve spent millions upon millions ever since trying to get back in the game and have had one failure after another. Here’s hoping that MS uses Yahoo as a business model!
but…according to surveys, most people will just skip windows 7…
James may be right about people waiting for Win 7 so as not to deal with Vista. But after Walt Mossberg’s column this week… If I were still a PC user (I was on PCs for most of my life before switching over), I’d seriously consider dumping Windows completely and migrating everything to OS X. It’d be far easier than the steps needed to ‘upgrade’ to Win 7.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204900904574304283334746634.html
Personally, I like having Microsoft around. I’m also happy when they have “wakeup calls” like this to remind them that the old IBM marketing model of creating markets (we’ll tell you what kind of products you want) doesn’t work. Without Microsoft’s initial success I doubt we’d have the quality of Apple products we now enjoy.
The first Apple products were very limited in terms of performance, options, software and highly proprietary. At that time the PC (with Microsoft OS) ruled because you could use the command line interface (much faster for experienced users) and the variety of options/software/peripherals from vendors was huge.
We now enjoy the wide variety of high-quality Mac products thanks to Apple’s focus to gain market share from Microsoft. I have a PC for absolute compatibility with customers and an iMac for myself. The iMac experience is outstanding, but I wonder… what would it be like now if Microsoft hadn’t come along?
“Microsoft’s incompetence so wonderfully demonstrated by Vista, and Microsoft’s arrogance so wonderfully illuminated by them even daring to sell such a pile of rubbish and thinking everyone would just swallow it.”
I’d be a little careful about statements like this. Does anyone remember Windows 98 and ME? Both of them were total pieces of garbage as operating systems. Then came XP which, in all honesty, was a solid operating system. I spent about 4 years doing development work on that platform and had extremely few problems (I now do mostly Open Source work from my Mac which is also very, very stable).
So before we all celebrate the death of Microsoft, let’s remember that everyone was making these same comments 10 years ago and it got MS motivated enough to release XP. Despite what people on here seems to think, MS is not a company full of morons. There are some very sharp people dealing with problems that Apple never has to worry about: Like running on a multitude of different hardware platforms, orders of magnitude more people trying to hack them, and enterprise level legacy users that prevent them from just throwing things out and starting over (which is what Apple did with its first version of OS X).
Vista was garbage. Win 7, like the last version of Office, will not be and 2-3 years from now the vast majority of users will probably be running it and Microsoft’s financials are going to look stellar again.