Microsoft Beats Earnings Expectations, Stock Takes Off

Business Insider ^ | 10/23/2014 | Jay Yarow

[SeekAndFind]

Microsoft earnings are out, and they're solid.

Here are the two numbers that matter:

• EPS: $0.54, which is down 13% on a year-over-year basis, versus expectations of $0.49
• Revenue: $23.2 billion, which is up 25% on a year-over-year basis, versus expectations of $22.02 billion.

The stock was up 4% after hours.

We spoke with Chris Suh, head of investor relations at Microsoft after the report. He said the company did well across the board, but revenue growth was driven by its consumer group. In particular, hardware sales.

[SeekAndFind]

[KoRn]

I just have a difficult time believing much of that.

Reading through those bullet points, I have the questions: How, what, and where? Can these companies simply make up numbers like the government does? If true, I believe it’s a ‘one-off’. There’s no good reason for this.

[bicyclerepair]

Have just started using a Linux computer. It’s THE most awesome pc I have EVER used. Fastest, sleekest looking desktop etc.

This Single 64bit Athlon with 2gb Ram Linux BLOWS AWAY any dual proc xp or win7 box that has 4gb or ram. I know because I have every OS on a kvm switch and can go between them at ease.

fyi
Linux Mint Cinnamon 17 is the flavor. Found this very helpful.

http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2014/07/linux-mint-17-cinnamon-ultimate-windows.html

[KoRn]

Just curious.

Why do you run multiple boxes attached by KVM, when you can just run VMs on one? Would use alot less space, and multitasking between them would be MUCH easier.

[zeugma]

Why do you run multiple boxes attached by KVM, when you can just run VMs on one? Would use alot less space, and multitasking between them would be MUCH easier.

Pretty much agreed on that. You need lots of RAM to do VMs well though. I've got 18GB, and I can run vms pretty much to my heart's content. Would hate to try to do that on a 2GB box.

RAM is cheap though. I recomment 8GB minimum if you're planning on stressing your computer. One of these days, I still plan on maxing my box out at 24GB. Even with 18GB, I've managed to max my box out a couple of times. (Pegged all 8 cores, and all 18GB  GB of ram doing some statistical analysis of some rather large data sets.)

[KoRn]

You’ve reminded me of the little ‘power plant’ at work that I built. hehe

An ESX Cluster with 396gb of RAM and 24 Xeon Processors. Was able to shrink a good part of our data center down into a couple of cabinets. (one for the cluster and the other for the EMC SAN)

It’s fun when they actually let you spend real money once every decade or so....

[zeugma]

An ESX Cluster with 396gb of RAM and 24 Xeon Processors. Was able to shrink a good part of our data center down into a couple of cabinets. (one for the cluster and the other for the EMC SAN)

We did that in my last job. It's amazing how many servers you can provision on an ESX box like that, especially when you're virtualizing a bunch of worthless windows boxes that were mostly just consuming power.

[KoRn]

Exactly! We had some servers that were just sitting there to host one service. Many of them could have run just fine on PCs, but you know how vendors are with their hardware requirements.

Using the P2V Converter, I was able to migrate most of them right in the middle of operations with ZERO downtime. I had it down to a science. After converting, I’d bring up the VM while shutting down the physical box we’re going away from, I’d run pings to both, and only lose ONE packet. The users never knew anything happened.....MOST of the time. lol

[zeugma]

Rather than rewriting this... I ranted a bit about some of what I saw during our virtualization effort here.

[KoRn]

Yeah, we had several servers that would have made no sense to convert. Usually it’s some quirk/fluke regarding hardware or resources. Some that immediately come to mind is one that had a big fax modem with several phone lines attached(that was a non starter). There was another with a 3TB local storage array, and it was using A LOT of it. I thought it would be crazy to use that much storage on the SAN for just one server.

Some of my favorites were the ones where a vendor claimed that they didn’t “support” their apps running on a virtualized server. The VAST majority of those vendors NEVER send people on site, so I’d just VM their servers anyway. They never knew the wiser. They could easily find out if they REALLY looked around when working remote for support, but I was pretty good at hiding it. Always sure to disable the VM Tools tray icon, that’s a dead giveaway lol. In almost every case, applications would perform BETTER after conversion. It was also fun toying with them when it came to unreasonable hardware requirements. They almost ALWAYS ask for too much for their apps. I’d usually see how much they REALLY used, make it APPEAR they have the amount they ask for, but throttle them in the VM configuration to not exceed ‘x’ amount of resources.

I also thought it odd that VMware never did a version of vCenter for Linux.

[adorno]

I just have a difficult time believing much of that.

Must be hard accepting that MS is performing well, and they just won't die or go away, like you wish.

So, tell me, how long do you think a company can continue lying about great earnings quarters, and those quarters have been many, for many years now.

Microsoft is a public company, with too many investors that could be lied to. Lying on a quarterly report can be easy to find, and it's impossible to tell lies for too long.

Fact is that, MS has been doing a lot better than Google for many years now, but, Google continues to have a high market value, and with no real growth path in sight; meanwhile, MS is the only tech company out there with huge diversification, which would make it more capable of surviving an economic downturn than any other out there, including Apple or Google or IBM or any other you can think of.

As far as I can tell, MS will come out with another quarter with good or great earnings, but, to you, it will be just another lie. But, keep lying to yourself, and whatever you do, don't get MS stock, because, the company's value is all a lie. BTW, It's never been true that Microsoft has sold so many Windows licenses; Apple is really the one with 90% market share in PCs.