Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

Hungry For Market Share, Yahoo Pulls Lawsuit Card On Facebook

Yahoo is trying to claw its way back in the search market, but the steady stream of executives heading for the exits is making that a difficult undertaking. So Yahoo is reportedly bringing in the legal hounds in an effort to leverage its intellectual property assets. According to The New York Times, Yahoo is trying to force Facebook to license 10 to 20 patents covering advertising, social networking, messaging and web site personalization.

Perhaps Yahoo will succeed in bringing Facebook to the table on a patent licensing agreement. But right now, this looks like a desperate move from a company that's running out of options.

Microsoft Windows Azure Hit With 24-Hour Outage

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service suffered an extensive, worldwide outage that took the software giant around 24 hours to fully address. Microsoft blamed the glitch on a leap day bug in its systems, but customers weren't happy about the lack of details the company provided on its Windows Azure status dashboard.

"What I've noticed is a complete lack of estimates on issues will be resolved. What is the reasons behind Microsoft not informing its customers when the issue will be resolved?" one angry customers said on an Azure user forum.

RIM's Struggles Continue Due To Weak Blackberry Shipments

Financial analysts aren't waiting until RIM finishes its fiscal quarter to predict that the struggling handset maker won't hit its sales and revenue projections.

"We are cutting our RIM estimates and target based on our belief that there is a greater than 50% chance that RIM will negatively pre-announce the February quarter," Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said in a research note, as reported by Forbes. "We believe sales of both RIM’s low-end and higher-end phones continue to be challenged."

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu is expecting RIM's quarterly handset shipments to drop from 11.9 million to 11.3 million, revenue to drop from $4.7 billion to $4.55 billion, and earnings per share to drop from 95 cents to 86 cents, as reported by All Things Digital.

Tech Data Takes Big Charge For Brazil, Columbia Exits

Tech Data's fiscal fourth quarter profit took a big hit as a result of the distributor's decision to close operations in Brazil and Columbia. In Q4, Tech Data's profit fell 30 percent due to a charge of 46 cents per diluted share it took for the Brazil and Columbia exits.

Flat Q4 sales didn't help matters, and shares dropped 6 percent in the wake of the announcement.

AT&T Ends Unlimited Data, Starts Capping Heavy Users

AT&T this week began throttling data speeds for customers whose usage exceeds 3 GB a month, bringing the all-you-can-eat data party to an end. Previously, AT&T had imposed the cap on the 5 percent of subscribers using the most bandwidth, which is the same policy Verizon has in place. For Sprint, the only U.S. carrier that doesn't throttle heavy bandwidth users, this could be a chance to gain much needed market share.