It's Tuesday, July 3rd. Welcome to Market Flory. I'm Chris Hill and joining me in studio today

from Motley Field Stock Advisor, Jason Moser and from Motley Cool Inside Value,

Joe Maker.

Good to see you.

Howdy. We have got emails galore. We've got some great questions about recent

conversations we've had on mobile phones, on beverage companies, but we are going to start

in Redmond, Washington where Microsoft announced it will be

posting a 6.2 billion, that's billion dollar write down for its online

services unit, which includes includes among other things the

Zoom Marketplace. Yes it still exists. It's where I do all my shop. Yeah exactly.

Joe what happened here? What is this? This is the result of a really terrible acquisition

from six years ago where they bought a company called a quantitative which

specializes in display ads. We always trash Microsoft on this show for making big splashy bad

non-core acquisitions and there's a good reason and this is kind of a poster boy element of this.

So they paid an 85% premium for this business, which was non-core, didn't fit a few years ago.

Eventually they come back and effectively said yesterday the business was worth

effectively nothing and wrote it down to zero so that six billion dollars down the

drain for this acquisition you know for a little context, that's the entirety of their dividend

for this year, so that's basically like your dividend being flushed down the toilet.

Thank you. Yeah, no, that's quite a bit of cash.

And honestly, the whole unit is really struggling.

The online services business, which primarily revolves around Bing, is lost money five years

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