noname2200 said:
Certainly, and I apologize for not doing so sooner. I won't be able to give you all the sources, since many of them are in print or were read by me quite a while ago, but here's one from last year that I scrounged up fairly quickly. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/309852_software02.html
Here's a sample for Q2 2008 (Q1 was good, and obviously, the full-year report isn't complete, and won't be until April 2009). http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=179255 Other recent reports have been fairly negative. The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, the Mercury News, routinely post pessimistic stories about Microsoft's outlook (although the latter is a Silicon Valley paper, so some bias towards the locals should be expected). There are others that I can scrounge up, if given more time. Again though, I want to reiterate that Microsoft isn't going down anytime soon. However, they are slipping from their high, and there's investor pressure on them to find their focus again. How Microsoft will respond remains to be seen, but I think the Yahoo! situation is a strong indicator: right now Balmer prefers to buy their way into a market, rather than start from the grass roots and grow from there. But I'm getting off-topic here, so...enjoy the links? |
No disrespect, you're a History major. I'm a business major. We should stick with what we know. You're showing us a graph of cash and short term investments, not net income. Cash and short term investments are used to judge liquidity, not profitability.
What's more the graph even mentions why microsofts cash and STI were low, they were repurchasing their own stock. I'm certain you don't know what this means or else you wouldn't be citing this graph and saying MS is losing money. They repurchase it because the companies believe its stock is undervalued, basically a good sign to investors.
I hope you didn't base your entire arguement on that one graph. 2004 was year microsoft paid the largest dividend (ever if i remember correctly) of 3.5 billion because they could not do anything with their huge cash reserves. They didn't lose 30 billion like you claimed in an earlier post. They used that money to pay the dividend and repurchase stocks.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmafp/is_200407/ai_n6848591
