EVERYONE speaks about financial scams in banks, but few people seem to remember that large companies too are a bit like bankx; being so, they use many financial tricks, such as deferrals, revenue-shaping, inside-trading, hidden loans, misinformation, pyramid schemes (e.g. with people's pensions) and so on. Techrights has covered and accumulated evidence of Microsoft's own dirty financial tricks and highlighted the fact that Microsoft has debt.

“I'm not sure how they can compensate for the damage they've done to the 'ecosystem' and to the legal systems.”
      --According to this new article from Reuters, Microsoft will report a loss. To quote the summary alone: "Microsoft Corp admitted its largest acquisition in the Internet sector was effectively worthless and wiped out any profit for the last quarter, as it announced a $6.2 billion charge to write down the value of an online advertising agency it bought five years ago."

Both tessier and iophk brought up this article in the IRC channel today. tessier wrote: "MS is going to report a LOSS? As in, the whole company?"

"Wow," he added. "Has this happened before?"

"Yes it's happened before," iophk wrote, citing this article which says: "the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers." (Source: The Economist)

"Reality eventually catches up with Enron-style accounting," iophk notes. "I'm not sure how they can compensate for the damage they've done to the 'ecosystem' and to the legal systems. But the Enron-style accounting cannot be kept up for ever." No wonder Microsoft continues to lay off employees, as last reported just months ago. ⬆