Microsoft's Job Cuts Are Finally Getting the Company to Think Straight

This article was originally published by TheStreet, and also appeared on Yahoo! Finance, on  July 22, 2014.

By Sarfaraz A. Khan.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- After months of speculation, Microsoft (MSFT_) announced unprecedented job cuts last week, targeting its recently bought Nokia division. Two top analysts say this move will give the world's biggest software vendor a renewed focus, allowing it to double down on new expanding businesses such information management, the cloud, or security.

While the job cuts appear to be driven primarily by the Nokia phone division acquisition, Mark Bowker, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, has said that Microsoft's restructuring efforts are pivoted toward its vision for the future, as opposed to the macro trends in the industry where technology giants have often resorted to layoffs to revive their flagging growth. Merv Adrian, Gartner's lead analyst on Microsoft, has predicted that Microsoft will continue growing in areas where it is seeing momentum.

Microsoft Not Just About Windows, Office, XBox Anymore

Tech giant Microsoft has made some significant management changes and has reported solid quarterly results, yet the company’s stock is up just 0.5% in the last 3 months. Are the investors missing something?

By Sarfaraz A. Khan, Research Assistant: Gohar Yousuf 

March 13, 2014

Last month, tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) made significant changes at the top. The company named a new CEO, its iconic founder Bill Gates (Trades, Portfolio) stepped down as chairman, it reassigned the head of the company’s hardware and entertainment products unit to make room for Nokia (NOK)'s former head Stephen Elop.

The management changes have occurred just weeks after the company released its impressive quarterly results. The company’s shares, however, have largely remained range bound since mid-November between $35 and $38.

Management Changes

A couple of days ago, it was revealed that Microsoft will give Stepehen Elop complete control of the Devices & Studios division by reassigning Julie Larson-Green, once the deal between Microsoft and Nokia closes. Larson-Green has been running the division, which is responsible for all of Microsoft’s hardware and entertainment products including Xbox and Surface tablet, since last year’s reorganization. Larson-Green will become the chief experience officer for the company’s application and services unit which is responsible for several products including Office, Skype and Bing.

In the beginning of February, after months of speculation, Microsoft finally named Satya Nadella as its new CEO. Nadella used to lead Microsoft’s cloud computing and enterprise business, which was the fastest growing operation of the company. Nadella will replace the company’s long running Chief … read full article at GuruFocus

Google’s Move Will Spark a New Price War

Google (GOOG) has ramped up the competition in cloud computing through the announcement of the general availability of Compute Engine. Google’s Compute Engine was initially launched about one and a half years ago but it was only available to some of its clients. With this push with cloud computing, Google seems intent on drawing large corporate customers as it aims to broaden its revenue base in the long run. Through its powerful brand, aggressive pricing and attractive features, Google believes that it will be able to emerge as a new major player in this market.

Google, however, has a long way to go before it becomes a real threat to the total dominance of Amazon (AMZN). The Compute Engine comes with agreement of performance, which guarantees that through this, the high volume workload will continue working 99.95% of the time, which is significantly above what is generally considered as the industry standard. In addition to that, the company has also cut the prices of its most popular Standard Instances, where clients can use Google’s computing power, by 10% in all regions. Moreover, the prices for Persistence Disks service have also been reduced by a massive 60% per gigabyte.

Besides the price cuts, Google has also added some new features to lure customers such as …. read full article at GuruFocus

Tablet Wars: Changing Industry Dynamics Catch up With Microsoft

From The Motley Fool

One of the world’s leading tech companies, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), recently released quarterly results that disappointed investors. The company missed both top- and bottom-line estimates on the back of weakness in the global PC market and poor sales of its flagship tablet computer. The PC market has been in recession for more than a couple of years, but Microsoft was too late to react. It is now trying to make some room for itself in a market dominated by Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPads and Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android.

Earnings miss

Microsoft reported income of $0.59 per share, as opposed to a loss of $0.06 per share in the same quarter last year, which came on the back of a $6 billion write-down. During this period, its revenue rose 10% to $19.9 billion. This meant that the company ended up missing Wall Street’s expectations for a profit of $0.75 per share coming from revenue of $20.7 billion. 

Is Oracle Just Another Cash Cow?

From The Motley Fool

By Sarfaraz A. Khan
Research Assistant: G. Yousuf
Includes Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM)

A week ago, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) reported quarterly results that missed analysts’ estimates by a small margin. The shareholders reacted negatively, and the company's shares dropped by 9.3% the following day. To help, the company has announced cloud computing deals with some of its biggest rivals. 

Earnings

The computer hardware and software company’s sales remained largely flat, showing an increase of just 0.3% from the same quarter last year to $10.95 billion, which were below analysts’ estimates of $11.12 billion. Oracles sales improved by just 2.4% in