Microsoft Misses Revenue Estimate By $1.3 Billion

Although, for the sake of your eyesight, this article hasn't been written in red ink, financial types might want to just go ahead and imagine it that way. The earnings report Microsoft released this afternoon contained all sorts of bad news.

The second sentence of the official release pretty well summed things up: "Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34 per share, which represented declines of 30%, 29% and 26%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period."

All of those numbers came in under analysts' estimates, too. Then here's the real doozy: while analysts wanted to see $14.4 billion in revenue, Microsoft reported $13.1 billion (which represented a year-over-year drop of 17 percent).