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Comment by xfax | Hacker News Reader

Sensationalist title much?

From TFA: "Analysts were expecting a $5.3 billion profit for the quarter, but that was canceled out by an even bigger loss on a five-year-old acquisition."

No, analysts were not expecting a $5.3B profit before the report; if they were they should probably not be in their jobs anymore. The after-hours price of MSFT shows that this news was already priced in and the loss was actually smaller that what was expected.

Geez.

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With these kind of common-sense oversights, I often wonder if many web reporters actually read the shit they shovel out.

Web reporting has very much become first-to-market, so I doubt it.

A bit sensationalist but it's also pretty darn remarkable. It's never happened before

I wonder why MS decided to take the $6B write-down at this moment (from a 5 year old "investment") to engineer the report as a "loss"?

Probably a mix of accounting rules and wanting to do it before Win8 launches.

Agreed about the sensationalist title. Most people didn't watch the earnings call or read the article. With the huge write down it was more than expected some loss. People are just eager to comment without knowing.

How the hell is a factual title "sensationalist"?

Please, enlighten me.

The title misleads by emphasizing a particular fact, chosen for sounding dramatic, without context that would put that fact into perspective.

There was one thing I noticed from the report.

Windows and Windows live revenues were down. There is a footnote which that this includes a reduction for deferred income due to rebate programs, but even if you add that back in, Windows revenue is still down.

However, it gets stranger. Windows revenue + unearned income is higher than it was a year ago, though not by much compared to other business units. So it is very hard to say what it actually means.

yea. From further down the page on HN: "Microsoft expected to post first quarterly loss".

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