<p>And of Microsoft’s profit, $5.9B was Windows. So nearly all their profit was in one business line. Office revenue was down 10%. The PC business is under huge stress and seems to be declining in face of tablets and phones - because, let’s face it, email and basic stuff like facebook are what most people do. But the stock was only down about 60 cents. </p>
<p>And I saw Nokia sold 4 million Lumias last quarter. That’s less than 10% of iPhone sales.</p>
<p>I’m looking forward to Amazon’s report. I hear they made a profit. And that total annual revenue is going to be $8B more than Apple’s revenue last quarter.</p>
<p>Msft’s stock value is two hundred billion less than aapl’s.</p>
<p>Nokia has a single digit stock price. </p>
<p>My wife is liking windows 8. She just bought a new computer. It is taking her a long time to figure windows 8 out. I don’t have the patience for that.</p>
<p>I don’t mind Windows 8 except the execution of the tiles is a mess. To be clear, I see the tile interface all over now. It’s the best way to hide complexity, much better than the old frames with headings. You can easily change your home page, update parts, etc. and not have to do a complete redesign that costs $$$$. But MS has implemented tiles in a half-bleeped way: tiles often don’t say what they are and they tend to pile information on without curating by MS. It sometimes feels like they’ve adopted the old metaphor of signs on a busy road all competing for attention. Apple would do this better.</p>
<p>Well, you don’t have to use the Modern interface at all with a few open source add-ons.</p>
<p>I use the tiles to launch programs but otherwise spend all of my time in the old Windows UI. I personally can’t stand the Modern UI or how Apps are run.</p>
<p>The market tends to reward and punish companies for the last quarter over the last year. It tends to over-reward companies and over-punish the companies for the … direction that are taking. What they give whimsically, they take away in the same manner.</p>
<p>If Apple price share does not make sense today, it surely did not make sense in its history, especially when the company was in the abyss or at the highest cloud.</p>
<p>Should we take bets about Apple having a continuing battered existence in 2013 and be in worse shape than … today. The invicible Apple armada is taking water from many sources. There is plenty of humility pies being baked on the shores.</p>
<p>That linked article is really dumb. The premise is that Apple doesn’t actually have $70B because in his mind Apple needs to set that much aside - in some way - because it relies on suppliers for capital investment. So his idea is that Apple might need $70B if it needs to build out a supply chain. Considering that Apple has worked for over a decade to build this kind of supply chain and that vertical integration is considered a huge inflexible drag which companies having been trying to get out of for years. It would be like writing that Microsoft should have been building computers in the 1990’s because they were relying on hardware makers who could have demanded better terms, could have moved to other OS suppliers, etc. So he would have said Microsoft should have wrecked itself. Idiotic.</p>
<p>It’s a fascinatingly odd take where you remove actual short-term cash from the balance sheet because you decide - and you alone - that Apple would perhaps maybe might need to build its own factories. He offers no reasons for this other than they rely on suppliers. And he gets most of that wrong: he has no idea how deeply Apple works with suppliers to develop its parts and technology. He also misses that Apple’s mobile chips are designed by Apple and built on contract. Some is bluntly humorous: Apple relies on a network of suppliers to generate improvements and somehow that is bad. It’s truly ridiculous.</p>
<p>BTW, turns out Apple is not issuing guidance this quarter - which was noted in stock movement analysis - because their stock buyback begins and they’re unsure how that will affect eps. I thought it was iPhone 5 supply chain uncertainty.</p>
<p>OK, so Amazon announced earnings, which were poor. Stock of course goes up because missing analyst estimates by a lot for Amazon is considered good news. </p>
<p>They made only $97M last quarter, down from $177M and a drop in eps from 38 to 21 cents.</p>
<p>Revenue was up 22%. </p>
<p>The only reason one can point to why the stock went up - other than irrationality - is that cost of sales went down about 4% and operating margins improved. Speaking of the latter, they went all the way up to 1.9% from 1.3%. Think of that: they make what a grocery store makes as margin. Which reminds me I read an article about Apple’s new 128G iPad. It had the headline - and subtext - that Apple charges more for flash memory than it costs. My reaction: isn’t that what companies are supposed to do? When did the standard become you should run without profit? In standard economics, high profits are an invitation to others to try to take them away from you. By the same token, Amazon’s negligible profits would be an attempt to dissuade others from entering their space; there isn’t enough to fight over. </p>
<p>As I remember, Apple’s revenue was up about 18%. On a much larger base.</p>
<p>There is only one real reason amzn goes up and aapl is in the doghouse - Jeff Bezos (the second coming of Steve Jobs) and Tim Cook (viewed as a dufus)</p>