Microsoft Corp.'s aim to seek patent royalties from open-source distributors and users may be an attempt to use legal threats to deflect attention from larger questions surrounding its business, including lack of interest in new versions of core products and lackluster profit from new wares.

"Said another way, Microsoft achieved record breaking earnings during the Vista launch quarter by taking money out of its assets, not through amazing sales of Vista and Office."

Now taking money of its savings account isn't necessarily a big deal... However, as a point in contrast, Apple Inc. has been launching a lot of products over the last nine months and has added almost $2 billion to its balance sheet and assets in the same period that Microsoft's assets dropped $6 billion.

Microsoft on Thursday reported a 65 percent jump in third quarter profits, buoyed by sales of its latest operating system, Vista. Exactly how many Microsoft has sold, however, is still a mystery.

[...]

Liddell declined to provide exact numbers on how many units of Vista the company had sold.

"Vista hasn't been a catalyst for PC sales," he said. "Looking at the weekly data, there really isn't anything happening with sales that has anything to do with Vista."

"This is a relic of old-line consumer products companies like Philip Morris, or fraudsters like Miniscribe who literally shipped bricks in lieu of disk drives to hit sales targets.

[...]

Channel stuffing is the business practice where a company or a sales force within a company inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling to the world at large.

[...]

We have a game we play around the office here with Microsoft press releases. The game is, "Find the words that make the headline true." It's not always easy.

[...]

Sony, like Microsoft, announces units shipped, not actually sold. This allows both companies to advertise sales numbers based on how many units they can force retailers to accept, not on how many units customers actually buy; both have considerable market power to push excess unsold inventory into the channel."

The company is changing three key features of the hypervisor technology to try to stick to its schedule of releasing the technology within 180 days of completing its Windows Server "Longhorn" operating system, due to be finalized before the end of the year.

"Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten..."

In the long years since XP was launched, Apple have come out with five major upgrades to OS X, upgrades which (dare I say it?) install with about as much effort as it takes to brush your teeth in the morning. No nightmare calls to tech-support, no sudden hardware incompatibilities, no hassle. Why hasn't Microsoft kept up? Unmaintainable

Right now, Microsoft has nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. After all the hype surrounding Vista, the Emperor has finally been revealed in all his naked glory. Some folks have been predicting the demise of Microsoft. I wouldn't go that far, but I am wondering how we're ever going to take Microsoft seriously again?

Vista SP1 is code named "Fiji", presumably after a pretty looking island which is paralysed by coups.

In a statement regarding the service pack Microsoft admits that Vista has "high impact" problems.

"With Alchin retiring, MarkL and MarkZ, two of the most talented architects in MS already having left, the picture gets really ugly for the Windows division," my friend claimed, and the BV's core team members, Ian McDonald, Jack Mayo, Todd Wanke, Clyde Rodriguez and others are starting to connect the dots.

[...]

He concluded ominously. "A trainwreck of biblical proportions looms. Pick a good seat on the sidelines, trainwrecks this large take awhile to complete. Vista may be the last MS OS for some time to come, especially if Cutler decides to play hardball."

But Microsoft has taken a series of steps to reduce its cash balance. Specifically, by Microsoft's count, the company has paid out nearly $100 billion through dividends and repurchasing its own stock in the past five years.

At this point, Former becomes impassioned. That's not fair, he says; we always saw this as a long-term venture. To which we reply that we were talking about the original Xbox, and while other divisions of the company throw off more profits in a single quarter than the entire $5 billion or so lost in the home and entertainment division to date, the fact remains that, as we take-our-word-for-it predicted, the Xbox group has been spectacularly unprofitable for Microsoft. Hence, our heretofore unpublished Vietnam analogy. The rest of the night is a blur, but we digress.

Microsoft says it will stick with Xbox. But with years of heavy losses behind it, the pressure's on for the gaming division to make good

If you were to judge by the PR rhetoric, you'd think the 360 was an unstoppable commercial juggernaut. As usual though, PR lies.

The company is folding its two worst-performing divisions -- Microsoft Business Solutions (its business applications unit) and its Mobile and Embedded units -- into the Microsoft Business Division and Microsoft Home and Entertainment units, respectively.

Millen also thinks $36 billion in planned share buybacks will help the stock.

There was a time in the 1990s when shares of Microsoft stock seemed to double every couple of years. 1996: college for the kids. 1998: a place on Whidbey. 1999: early retirement.

Times have changed.

Microsoft shares, which have been dormant for the last few years, have been looking up over the last couple months. The Dow industrials component has gained about 20% since hitting a 4-year low of $21.46 o June 13.

To help move things along, Microsoft not only launched a $40 billion stock repurchase program that lasts through 2011, the company also said its previously announced 4-year, $30 billion stock buyback program was completed in just 2 years.