Rick Sherlund Quotations

We are reducing our March quarter revenue estimate due to growing evidence that PC unit growth did not likely come up to our expectations. PC growth was very sluggish from November through February, and while it reaccelerated in March, it does not appear to have occurred fast enough to offset the weakness earlier in the quarter.

I just don't think Judge Posner would be spending time on this unless they were making progress,

It's bad to surprise the Street. It's harmful to the stock because investors are looking for the rewards of this big product cycle next year flowing through to earnings.

As the year progresses, the stock will build its multiple.

In the whole scheme of things, are we ever going to remember when this product shipped, a few years down the road? No. It's going to be a big product. It's a question of timing.

I think that would take the stock down a lot. It would open them up to massive follow-on litigation.

We view this favorably for Red Hat, given our view that Red Hat will need to move up the infrastructure stack and add a database, application server, portal, and integration technology to deliver an open-source infrastructure stack to compete with that of BEA , Oracle , IBM and Microsoft .

The stock may not yet be entirely out of the woods if the December quarter results do not show some further re-acceleration in corporate PC demand, at which point there may be a better basis for revising estimates further,

The stock had been at about this level just a month ago, and I think this is going to continue to be a damper, at least for the next three months or so. The news doesn't look like it's going to be good for a while.

Consumer PC sales account for only about 10 percent of Microsoft's total revenues, so with corporate demand likely in line with expectations, our estimate revision is only relatively moderate,