back to article Microsoft Q1 sales pays price for Win 7 launch

Microsoft's first quarter was not as bad as expected, but still pretty bad compared to a year ago. The company saw revenue for the period fall to $12.92bn compared to $15.06bn in the first three months of 2008. For the first financial quarter ended September 30, Microsoft made operating income of $4.48bn, versus $5.99bn in …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Wait for it.....

    "this shows that M$ is on a road to oblivion, Linux / Apple blah blah blah"

    Note the billion pound revenues are per QUARTER, a compay making that much money is hardly going to go bankrupt in a year or two, so reports of MS's death are a little premature. Also, remember these figures are before a major launch, look at most companies figues before a product refresh, they tend to do the same, i.e. drop.

    Flame on.

  2. eugene

    GFC?

    I'd imagine the global financial crisis might have a hand in that somewhere?

  3. Doug 3
    Paris Hilton

    a deferral of $1.47bn on what?

    their product is factory loaded something like 75% of the time, if not more, so what exactly are the costs they deferred? Sounds like they dork with the books and instead deferred marketing costs more than anything else.

    and with about a 50% return rate on the Xbox360 yet they show a profit? Oh, that's right, they wrote off billions to cover that a year or so ago. Probably time for another big write-off in the division though since Sony is starting to pick up the pace.

    Paris because she's so transparent.

  4. Doug 3
    Jobs Halo

    re: Wait for it.....

    they won't fall all at once but when it does happen, they will have to pull the plug on supporting so many of their money losing ventures that it'll seem like they are shutting down. The vast majority of their profits come from the Windows OS(desktop/server) and Microsoft Office and they continue to lose a billion or so annually on Windows Mobile, MSN, online stuff, Xbox, etc. So as they move further down the curve, they'll have to start cutting more than just a few jobs and things like MS Money.

    And it does not help one bit that the iPhone and now Android is showing people that they don't need Windows to have a useful computing experience. They'll either have to start moving software to other platforms and try to compete or keep riding the market down to where they are just another player.

    Angelic Steve because they opened peoples eyes to the fact that there can be a happy life outside of Windows.

  5. Mikey 1

    @Doug 3

    Nah, they deferred revenue not cost. Sold a whole bunch of Win7 early to the OEMs to make for a nice release day and the profit will show up next quarter.

    Either way, shucks. Big numbers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Playing with the big boys

    This is why companies like doing business with companies like MS and IBM and not switch to Linux or other technically superior but niche offerings.

    Companies like MS can weather these storms without the risk of going bust or failing to provide support and honour contracts.

    If Apache didn't have companies like IBM and Sun lurking in the shadows to keep them in beer money, or Firefox had Google to pay all their bills, or Ubuntu had John Shuttleworth sprinkling the readies on it like a bag of tea leaves, they'd have got nowhere because no one important would ever take notice of them. The complete failure of sans-Google Mozilla suite is proof of that.

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