Earnings out of the US on balance were decent, there was a wide miss from Microsoft who reported in the aftermarket Thursday, the stock down 11.4 percent in normal trade Friday. I guess that even though the extent of the Surface RT (the tablet business) write off of 900 million Dollars, only seven cents a share, the fact is that they are not making as much progress as they want to. Or need to, for their shareholders. The fact is, the PC business is struggling, we are running at a quarterly PC sales run rate of 76 million. Two years ago, that peaked in Q3 2011 at 96 million a quarter. You can see exactly why Microsoft are struggling here, in a changing world of consumer behaviour. And amazingly as it may sound, Microsoft actually coined the phrase "Microsoft Tablet PC". It was made over a decade ago, but never quite took off.
So what now? Sometimes it is best to get the biased view of a shareholder, this fellow took the time and effort to review the results: Microsoft Corporation's Results Aren't That Bad. Sign up for Seeking Alpha website, some of their "stuff" is OK, some of it is downright average. But almost always written by people who have an agenda, and that is more useful to me anyhow, than folks who have no skin in it! And while I talk (write), my Microsoft Outlook crashes..... sigh. I need a new notebook, but I just can't figure out which one, partly because I do not like Windows 8.