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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is trying to improve the bad feeling Yahoo investors have about the companies’ search-advertising partnership. Yahoo’s shares plummeted 12 percent Wednesday after the deal was announced, and they continued dropping Thursday, ending 4 percent lower at $14.60. Shares slipped another 2 percent on Friday, closing at $14.32. Ballmer said he doesn’t understand why.
Microsoft said Tuesday it is planning to open its first two retail stores in Arizona and California this fall. The software maker said Tuesday it signed leases at shopping centers in Mission Viejo, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz. The Shops at Mission Viejo is already home to an Apple store. The other location, Scottsdale Fashion Square, does not have a competing Apple shop.
Microsoft is inventing a new malady for which its new Web search site, Bing, is the only cure. That’s the premise of the $100 million, four-month advertising campaign Microsoft hopes will turn Bing into a verb and give the software maker a fighting chance against search leader Google.
Dell said Thursday its fiscal first-quarter profit fell 63 percent as the recession continued to crimp computer sales around the world. The results, coupled with a cautious outlook from the world’s top PC seller, HP, indicate that the computer market has not improved much since last year’s economic meltdown led to a holiday season that was the industry’s worst stretch in six years.
Global shipments of personal computers fell 7.1 percent in the first three months of the year, but the decline was smaller than expected, and research group IDC on Wednesday said the industry could turn around by the end of the year. A second research group, Gartner, calculated first-quarter PC shipments fell 6.5 percent from the same period in 2008.