5 Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

IBM Misses In Q1 On Weak Server Sales

Looks like IBM is headed for some major changes after a fiscal 2013 first quarter in which profit dipped 1 percent and revenue fell 5 percent. In IBM's first-quarter earnings call, CFO Mark Loughridge said IBM will cut staff and sell off certain pieces of its business as it tries to right the ship.

"There are parts of our business that are in transition or have been underperforming, like elements of our Power, [System] x and storage product lines that showed disappointing performance in the first quarter," Loughridge said during the call. "Here we're going to take substantial actions," he said, without offering details.

Intel Struggles In Q1 As Profit Drops 25 Percent

Intel reported first-quarter profit of $2.05 billion, down 25 percent year over year and the latest indication of it getting hammered by the post-PC revolution. Revenue dropped 7 percent overall and 7 percent in the chip maker's PC client division. Despite a ray of hope from server chips, which boosted Intel's data center revenue by 7 percent, the company continues to fight against the tide of a dwindling PC industry.

AMD Posts Loss Despite Beating Expectations

AMD beat Wall Street's super-low expectations for its fiscal first quarter and gave guidance for the current quarter that also was above what analysts were expecting. Yet the chip maker's shares dove 6 percent in the wake of the announcement. AMD reported a $146 million loss in the first quarter, or 19 cents a share, compared with a loss of $590 million, or 80 cents a share, in last year's first quarter.

Google Hit With Gmail, Docs Outage

Google had what it said was an outage to its Gmail cloud email service that impacted "less than 0.007" of its user base of 425 million. Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Presentations also were affected by the outage, Google said in its subsequent mea culpa. Is this outage a big deal? Probably not. Is it going to perpetuate the fears some users have about relying on cloud services? That's probably a yes.

Nokia Sales Tank In Q1 Despite Smartphone Uptick

Nokia's revenue dropped 20 percent in its fiscal first quarter to $7.7 billion. But the bigger gut punch came in the form of a quarterly loss of more than $354 million. Ouch. Investors didn't like it and, frankly, it's not hard to see why. Nokia did report an uptick in Lumia smartphone sales, but that didn't do much to chase away the dark clouds that continue to stubbornly hover over the troubled mobile device vendor.