Microsoft has never reported a loss in its 26 years as a public company until Thursday when a gargantuan $6.19 billion write-down on aQuantative, the online ad agency it acquired in 2007 for $6.3 billion to compete against Google, plus $540 million in deferred revenue on Windows 8 nominally caused it to lose money.
It lost $492 million or six cents a share on revenues up 4% to $18.06 billion. It made $5.87 billion, or 69 cents a share last year. Excluding the adjustment Microsoft would have made 73 cents a share.