Why The Register MS Sold Out to Microsoft: They're Losing Lots of Money, The Register MS is Bleeding to Death, Based on Its Own Financial Records
Redmond may be a crime capital of the world if one qualifies accordingly; many nations treat Microsoft's behaviour as seriously unlawful (which it is).
So why would publishers fail to heed the warning?
Last summer Microsoft took over The Register UK, turning it into The Register US or The Register MS (Microsoft). We wrote a lot about this at the time. We explained what happened.
A month ago the publisher released its latest financial report. The signature is dated end of January and the report was made public the following month:
A lot of the content is template-like (for compliance and consistency reasons), but the "meat" comes in pages 11 onwards. Remember they shut down some office to lower costs and indeed, expenses went down by about 1.5 million pounds. But turnover also fell by a million pounds or by about 20% in one year!
Their assets decreased in value and in one single year they lose more money than their total assets are asserted to be worth:
Notice that in (brackets) those are negatives. Their debt is fast increasing and it looks unlikely they can ever pay it back.
They've managed to double deficits in one year.
A more detailed breakdown follows in the next few pages.
Their "Going Concerns":
The number of employees decreased from 39 to 28 (page 20).
Directors' salaries (or equivalent) increased. Page 21 indicates the pension stayed the same.
With over 6 million pounds in debt (nearly 10 million US dollars) we guess it's likely some other company will take over the site (if it deems it worthwhile). If not, the site might perish or be run by volunteers. █