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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: taxman who wrote (19358)	3/30/1999 9:27:00 PM
From: t2	Respond to of 74651

Actually, I have not thought about the EPS estimates yet. I just try to guess how much they will beat them by. I am going to start guessing on this quarter's earnings soon. June quarter will be like December or even better in terms of how much they surprise. For March I would look back to June 98 quarter since they preannounced a positive EPS surprise---got 56 cents ahead of the 50 or 49 which was expected (i think i got the right figures). That is actually after telling the street to raise estimates to 49 or 50 with a month or a bit more til the end of that quarter. You get the idea of how much of a cushion or "earnings surprise" they want. IMO, this is why they were not focussing too much on how the Office revenue shortfall was going to be made up--at that point they already knew things were fine. Notice how Maffei stated that the "shortfall" will be made up with investment gains. He knows these gains have nothing to do with earnings from operations. Yet he implied that there was no reason to cut estimates for the quarter, knowing that the street is really interested in earnings from operations. The other thing to keep in mind is that analysts have really kept estimates low for the current quarter for MSFT. Easier to beat the numbers--maybe too easy for MSFT.