Summary: Microsoft makes changes to the way it reports earnings after its profit fell by about a third for two consecutive quarters

AS we highlighted before, Microsoft had hidden its Mobile and Business Applications units by shuffling things around [1, 2]. The intent was to conceal Microsoft's weaknesses and give shareholders the illusion that business across the entire spectrum was profitable. Well, Microsoft seems to be doing it again and Mary Jo Foley's report, which is similar to previous ones, get responses such as this:

Let's fudge the numbers some more

This is comical to me. Anything that Microsoft can do to jumble numbers around to try and justify that it isn't failing in some of its recent ventures. Finally, Microsoft is coming back down to earth, whether it likes it or not. I believe this is being caused by several factors. But the most interesting is the adoption of the market to other products from Apple and also to Linux.

It's obviously switcheroo time. Microsoft did this a few years ago in order to hide big losses in particular divisions. Here is another separate take on the news:

Netbooks are not going away soon. ARM is taking off. “7″ will burden netbooks with higher prices. Nowhere to hide.

[...]

The huge momentum of netbooks is coming from telcos who supply cheap client machines to customers. They will want the cheapest machines, ARM running GNU/Linux. This is commodity computing, folks.

We wrote about this before. Low-end computers are destroying Microsoft's profitability. ⬆