What goes up must come down as they so cruelly say to football clubs that don’t survive their first year in the First Division, and Microsoft Corp shares had crashed $7.50 to $54.50 by 12.46pm New York time yesterday as the company warned that its third quarter sales will likely be between $180m and $200m, lower than the $200m to $215m currently looked for by most market analysts, and profits will likely be down on those of a year ago, although sales will be ahead of the $161.8m of a year ago: the company blames delays in product shipments and overstocking by some key distributors and resellers – Word 4.0 for the Macintosh and Word 5.0 for MS-DOS were both delayed, while strong demand has caused the company to run out of stock of the current versions of both products worldwide, and it has decided to wait for the new versions rather than restock the old versions.
