Microsoft posts first-ever quarterly loss in history of the company

Not the greatest quarterly earnings conference call for Microsoft shareholders earlier Thursday afternoon. For the first time in its 26-year history as a public company, Microsoft posted a loss for the quarter instead of a profit.
Microsoft announced a loss of $492 million for the April to June quarter of 2012, equating to a six cents per share loss. Last year at this time, Microsoft was popping their corks over a $6 billion quarterly profit.
Of course, there are so many accounting tricks and fiscal misdirections in this Microsoft quarterly earnings report that the whole thing makes less sense than switching your homepage to Bing. For instance, they actually refer to April through June of 2012 as the year's "fourth quarter"!
Okay, that's a pretty standard accounting practice. Some of the other accounting tricks, though, are a little less run-of-the-mill. Most notably, they wrote off a $6.2 billion loss from 2007 as occurring in mid-2012. The loss is from their purchase of the online ad service aQuantive, which was supposed to turn their Bing search engine into a money maker. The results were as lame as the name "aQuantive".
In other words, Microsoft has just been keeping that loss in their back pocket for a couple years, just waiting for the right quarter to throw it into an earnings report. Do you think they're posting it this particular quarter for tax reasons? Take a wild guess.
If you need any more proof that these books are slightly cooked, consider also that Microsoft has another $540 million in revenue just sitting in the bank that they chose not to declare yet. That $540 million is from Windows 8 upgrade sales. It's not funny money, speculative income, or some mortgage-based derivative -- it's money they actually have right now.
Had Microsoft included this revenue in this quarter's earnings, they would have posted a tiny profit rather than a loss.They announced a loss this quarter by choice.
I'm no financial analyst (though I play one on the internet!), but one can see a clever rationale for Microsoft dumping all their bad news in one fell swoop now. They've got the Windows 8 release coming in a couple months. Tech peeps are all abuzz over and the Windows 8 phone and Microsoft Surface tablet. Folks are generally loving the forthcoming Office 2013. Post the bad stuff now, they may be figuring, to make next quarter's earnings inherently rosier.
Plus, you know, it's July -- plenty of Microsoft's deep-pocketed investors are at the Four Seasons in Maui, sleeping, surfing, and hot-tubbing through the mid-summer earnings reports. This is an awesome time to bury bad news.
Need more proof that investors aren't particularly spooked by the quarterly loss? Microsoft shares are up 61 cents in after hours trading since the "bad news" was announced.