Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Microsoft FY07Q2 Results

Well, hard to believe it's been three months already since the last quarterly results. Holidays and windstorms and snow storms have a way of compressing time, I guess. As has been a tradition, I'm going to put up this post before the results are out to provide a place for folks to comment as they listen to / read the results and also to later update and point to any interesting analysis.

I especially look forward to analysis by MSFTExtremeMakeover, Mr. Joe Wilcox, and Mr. Todd Bishop.

While no one is looking for a break-out quarter, lots and lots of us are looking eagerly towards the forward guidance and questions about Vista and Office 2007 uptake. And sales and deployment around SQL Server, VS2005, Xbox units, and Zune. Yeah. Just kidding about that last one, though I'm sure Zune is going to come up as part of the strategy Q&A. Let's see what color lipstick they choose for dressing up those numbers.

And I'm happy to see Mr. Liddell schedule an internal employee meeting to review our stock and performance. Though we could have used that kind of forum two or three years ago.


Post-results coverage:

It was interesting trying to judge the numbers by looking at the headlines alone. It was either us beating estimates or net income being off by 28%.

Please drop a URL into the comments of additional articles you find interesting.


Other going ons:

Makin' or Fakin' Shareholder Value! MSFTextrememakeover - Growing Shareholder Value Yeah, not so much. Great analysis. One of the comments echoes what no doubt many feel:

Lately, the 900 Partners get the bulk of the stock issued, and the people actually building the products fight for scraps. I don't think it's mere coincidence that the company is having so many execution problems. The [switch] from rewarding everyone to rewarding only the executive crowd correlates [pretty] well with the decline in productivity.

I've been avoiding the internal InsideMS blog as much as I can. But it's like an epic car wreck where I just have to peek in at least once a week. Pay pay pay is the drum the Microsofties are beating. Rebalancing the distribution back to the employees where it has the greatest impact has to happen.

Petals for Zuzu, Moolah for Wikis: I swear. The last thing you want to do sometimes is connect to a blogger. Before you do that, ask yourself, "Now then, what's the absolute worse thing that could happen? And how bad would it be if they all went screaming to TechMeme and it got picked up as a top wire story?" Fancy Vista laptops. Wiki editing requests. Is it such a positive for Microsoft to be so transparent?

When I first saw the Wikipedia brouhaha, my reaction was: "Dang, we should have had a blogger or someone who knows how to connect with the tech world handle this." Then I read the details. Oh. We're trying to play by the rules here. And we're seeing the results of that. Thanks. Considered us schooled. Anyway, Doug is cool is my book... I appreciated his comments in light of that "anonymous-bad" wildfire.

More:

BillG on the Daily Show: Bill Gates slated for 'Daily Show' appearance. That should be fun. Or exceptionally awkward. But maybe our parody folks will work with the Daily Show crew to finally put out some fun shorts that can be released to the public. If only I'd known sooner... I'm sure we could have worked out some kind of BillG chasing after Mini to the Yakety Sax / Benny Hill music.

Administrivia: I'm poised to move to the new Blogger (where you will get a comment feed!) but I have to wait due to the size of this blog. Continue thinking good thoughts.

Updated: added links to results / results discussion.


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