Did Microsoft Beat Or Miss Expectations?

from the creative-headlining dept

Well, here's a perfect example of how you news reports can be incredibly misleading with their headlines. If I happened to catch the headline from Smart Money about Microsoft's earnings announcements today, I would find out that "Microsoft's Sales Come in Better Than Expected". Sounds good, right? However, over at CBS Marketwatch, I'm told "Microsoft misses earnings expectation". Wait a second... Of course, if you look at the details, they're both right. The sales were better than expected, but the earnings were at the low end of expectations. However, the impression that each headline gives off is very different.
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  1. identicon
    Glenn, 18 Jul 2003 @ 8:25am

    No Subject Given

    Well you really need both sets of information, or more. For a headline only to say that Microsoft missed earning's targets, you wouldn't know anything really, except that they forecasted poorly. As it is you don't really know much anyway. Did they beat their sales forecasts, and just spent more on R&D than expected? Or did their sales not go up as much as expected? In the end, I guess we'll just have to read the articles, huh.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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