Microsoft Stock Drops 11% In a Day 467
Taco Cowboy writes with news that Microsoft's stock price dropped over 11 percent yesterday. The selloff was the biggest since 2009, and during the day the price was down more than 12 percent at one point, making it the biggest single day drop since April, 2000. Analysts believe the drop was due primarily to the company missing its quarterly earnings projections in addition to taking a massive, $900 million write-down on unsold Surface RT tablets. "Microsoft’s decline is both a consequence of the changing dynamics of the tech world and the incredible surge in its stock price this year. Shares in the maker of Windows had rallied nearly 30% this year, leaving both the broader stock market and the technology sector in the dust. It was, it seemed, Steve Ballmer’s year. Until Friday. The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units. Being the world’s largest software company, 'over 80% of its revenue and nearly all of its profits continue to be derived by its ubiquitous Windows OS, its server business (Windows Server), and the business division (Office),' according to UBS. And indeed that decline in the PC industry is hurting the company’s bottom line."
Re:Metro UI (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardware and Services (Score:4, Interesting)
HA HA, TIME TO CHANGE THE COMPANY TO HARDWARE AND SERVICES. UH OHHH
Steve SERIOUSLY fucked up hard.
I wonder how long it will take for people to vote to kick him out.
Not only are people NOT buying their hardware, barely anyone is buying their services either.
Meanwhile their OS and Office apps are still the thing that makes them even exist.
And the one thing they depend most on, the business types, THEY SHAFT THEM ENTIRELY WITH THE NEW OS.
Great idea Baldness, great idea. Doing the company proud. And then Technet got killed. Up next, MSDN on the chopping board.
Not to mention Xbone. I seriously thought the whole 180 reversal on the DRM was some sort of reverse bait and switch, "hey, have our shitty product!", everyone hates it, "HAAA, gotcha, here, but seriously, have our less shitty product! We removed the really good features and the really bad features!".
They seriously never done that though, they ACTUALLY designed it like that, and after Don was eliminated from the company floors, that further proves it. And the many thousands to million servers they had for Xbone now being touted for Azure instead probably.
We won't see Microsoft die any time soon, but they will eject the monkey in control if this gets any worse.
Linux will become more popular on the desktop as more games are moving to it, which will take a large chunk of gamers out of their income.
Steam already has a decently large number of games supported now, and it is growing.
People are seeing through Microsofts bullshit, took a while, but finally they are seeing them for what they are.
The stock market isn't based on real value (Score:5, Interesting)
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
Re:It's not about the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Is about the trust. Their closed platform and their "we respect your privacy" internet services busted badly. Why anyone in the world will put their intelectual property, privacy, business proposals and so on in an environment that leak their information by design? That directly lies their consumers saying that their information is safe because they encrypt them? That will keep remote vulnerabilities intentionally open for a year or more, so can be exploited by NSA and associated private companies?
The NSA helped more to popularize linux on the desktop than all the open source community with its practices.
World Changed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Metro UI (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Re:World Changed (Score:4, Interesting)
now we have an internet built around open standards, and with HTML5, the services we use will be less dependent on the use of any particular company's platform
Re:Metro UI (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
zune was a failure so they took the zune guys ideas and made windows phone 7 and then took the ideas and made windows 8. it's a failtrain all around. the stock price drop might be indication of that people are figuring out that they need some big change of decision choosers to not failtrain any further - like heck, what are they going to failtrain next, the xbox one?
good product indicator in ms products is sales, zune wasn't particularly bad but it wasn't great either and downright annoying in few ways. what ties all these products together is that they feel "ok" if you use them for 3 minutes - they all have that dazzle over complex function quality, movie OS quality. for the money dumped into zune marketing it sold pretty badly, same goes for the other two products in the failtrain. they sold a "lot" if you compare them to say, how much beos sold, but nobody would take you seriously if you did that.
people didn't consider surface rt as good value for money, hence they got stuck on the shelves. don't dance around it, nobody really wants them. I've heard dozens of people trying to justify how it's a great product for someone else though.. all of them being devs(the kind of who do only .net) or people otherwise married to ms. and normal people, like my mom? they don't know what the fuck surface rt is, heck, even ms reps fail at knowing what's the difference.
though why am I replying to someone who says that surface RT sold well just days after MS admitting that they failed to meet the projected sales so much that they took a 900 mil beating with them....
I don't know a single person who bought surface RT, not one! anyone I heard had one got it for free for the sake of porting. it's not a product you would spend your own money on and no corporations are spending their money on it either and people with them are not recommending them to others, freaking 100 bucks shit tablets are doing better. hell, even the padfone is doing better.
Re:Metro UI (Score:5, Interesting)
Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone? MS completely lacks anything close to that kind of vision or innovation. They wait for others to innovate, see if its making money, then jump in and try to grab marketshare. That worked in the '90's. It doesn't work now. A moron could see the RT was DOA.
Re:Chicken or Egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
They were slow even with 7. The problem is, that new PC you got 5 years ago can still play Games and browse the web just fine and there's no reason to upgrade. That's where Microsoft's EOL for Windows comes in handy, XP is ending soon and that will force people to finally choose where they want to go after the NSA/8 fiasco.
The only reason to upgrade came from new versions of Windows using more RAM and running slower than previous versions. Also new Games played a part but they don't count anymore, Indie devs are moving in now and most of those Games don't require a high power machine. And people like me whom have already switched to Linux don't need to worry about upgrading. With something like Xubuntu, everything runs fast and snappy even with the latest versions and no 'windows rot' that degrades your machine over time.
So yeah, it's not looking all that great for Microsoft unless they find a new line of business besides Software. And I'd highly recommend they cut ties with the NSA. But they are a very hard-headed company.
Re:Negative press (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're being facetious, but I think it's worth sharing a few reasons why this reorganization really is a bad idea in the long-term. I'd write something up, but someone who has firsthand experience working inside both Apple and Microsoft [stratechery.com] (he only left Microsoft a few weeks ago, in fact) has already provided a series of insightful essays on the issue, explaining why this sort of organization works for Apple but not for Microsoft:
Functional vs. Divisional organization structures [stratechery.com]
Why functional doesn't work for MS [stratechery.com]
Microsoft's failure to recognize what role their products should be playing [stratechery.com]
I feel like I'm shilling for him, but I really do think that what he's written on the topic is a must-read with a lot of good points.
Re:Chicken or Egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Win8 slowed PC sales. It's just anecdotal; but you hear people say they were at the store and didn't want to buy a machine unless it came with Win7. Otherwise, they're waiting to see if MS can get rid of the New Coke OS and replace it with Classic.
I'm in the market for a new PC and I can tell you that I'm waiting for that Metro train wreck to be sorted before buying another Windows PC. In fact I'm starting to lose hope and am wondering if I should be looking at Macs instead.
Everybody has it backwards (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows sales are not down because of weak PC sales, PC sales are down because nobody wants the new Windows.