Two years after Microsoft rattled Wall St committing to spend millions against Google, the company's said it'll be at least another two years before investors see any return on the investment. Chief financial officer Chris Liddell, announcing Microsoft's fourth-quarter and fiscal 2008 results, told Wall St it'll likely be …

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Friday 18th July 2008 08:23 GMT Andy ORourke

A meaningless statistic?

"Microsoft claimed more than 180m Windows Vista licenses have now been sold, up 40m from the last official figure."

OK so they managed to "sell" 40m "licences" I am willing to bet that the majority of those "sales" were via equipment manufacturers and that a lot of the kit the licence was "sold" for are actually not running Vista.

Now i actually use Vista out of choice, I paid for the thing for gods sake. I (personally) find it to be faster and more stable than my old XP install. Then again I dont do any wierd or out of the ordinary stuff on my PC so I have never had any issues with all the DRM stuff that most people complain about

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Friday 18th July 2008 08:23 GMT Tony Paulazzo

Missing Bill Gates

Without BG's bloodthirsty drive I forsee Microsoft going the way of IBM. Now is the time for upstart hungry companies to start their attack vectors. I always tell customers about OpenOffice, to replace the resource sucking MS Office 2007.

Basically, MS was Bill, he wasn't running a company, he was fulfilling a mission. The new guy could care less as long as obscene amounts of money goes into his bank monthly.

Vistas' sales are simply new machines waiting to be sold and with Gates gone, how long before PC makers find other 'deals'. Now is the time for a modern DR DOS to offer a windows alternative (and no, I don't mean Apple or Linux but an OS that will run windows apps perfectly, will run leaner and will be cheaper).

C'mon developers, there must be someone out there... somewhere...

PS. I HATE - Ipods, Iphones, Itunes, Quicktime etc etc etc.

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Friday 18th July 2008 08:23 GMT Anonymous Coward

Here is a dollar...

...buy a clue. Living off past glories and hoping for a brighter future.

Until they reinvigorate the development teams and chop out some of these partners who are afraid to take risk in case they lose their meal ticket nothing will change.

How many more purchases will they make all coming to naught. Or purchasing excellent tools only for them to die internally because they have a strategy of buying something innovative in case the other guy takes it.

Look at Sea Dragon and PhotoSynth, they have been in the live labs too long and should be out there as Live tools with a revenue model to support their usage.

Here is another dollar buy a strategy!

Paris, because she would have turned it around by now, or at least handled it better in the dark.

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Friday 18th July 2008 08:50 GMT Adrian

Search engine losses

US$1.2 billion

AMD losses in total US1.19 billion

AMD should be brought up by Microsoft and then they could tie their software to their hardware ala Apple. Hasn't hurt them with anti-trust suits.

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Friday 18th July 2008 09:17 GMT Anonymous Coward

Cool - first Windows, now Wall Street profit promises

OK, reality check. He promises to see profit in 2 years. Judging by the usual Microsoft delivery date slippage that makes, umm, say, 2014 or something?

This is a vendor that is slipping in perceived value, has not delivered in any other market than where it maintains a monopoly for which it is now fined left right and center and has pissed off their customers to a large degree by not delivering as they could with all the talent they bought.

I think unless they start delivering something worth the money the Wall Street promise can be seen as a plea for investors not to walk away just yet.

They can do better. They should.

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Friday 18th July 2008 13:17 GMT William Old

"Trust me on this..."

Yeah, right... this has got to be concrete evidence that the ordure is arriving at the rotary air-redistribution device as far as Vista is concerned...

> Microsoft claimed more than 180m Windows Vista licenses have now been sold, up 40m from the last official figure.

Yes, but on how many actual systems is it still installed? I'm happy to conclude that the installed user base is increasing rapidly, but measured in thousands, not millions...

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Friday 18th July 2008 14:54 GMT Anonymous Coward

Lies, Damn Lies and Oh, never mind....

'nuff said.

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