Microsoft posted a quarterly loss of $492 million. That wasn’t unexpected considering its $6.2 billion write-down of its aQuantive venture. Core business remained strong. A tablet and other new products are on the way. Still, it was the company’s first quarterly loss.

All is not well in Redmond and the stakes couldn’t be higher for the Seattle area. Beyond Microsoft’s anemic stock price and ongoing criticism of CEO Steve Ballmer, there is the Vanity Fair expose by Kurt Eichenwald coming out in the August edition. It describes a deeply dysfunctional company that suffered “a lost decade.”

Dan Gillmore, the longtime columnist for the San Jose Mercury News now writing for The Guardian, and no fan of Microsoft during the antitrust fight, says it’s too soon to count the company out. The lost decade was heavily influenced by the antitrust battle. But “Microsoft is not standing still, despite the corporate inertia, or worse, that Eichenwald capably describes. That said, Microsoft does face an existential crisis, much as IBM did in the 1980s and especially the 1990s. I don’t know if CEO Steve Ballmer is the right leader to steer this mega-ship through the storms; when the company forced out Ray Ozzie, a technology genius and one of the possible heirs apparent, it lost one of its best disruptors of the status quo.”

What do you think? (And don’t forget you can post your views in the comments section).

Is Microsoft toast?

Read on for the best links of the week and the haiku:

This Week’s Links:

• Amazon’s stock price is unjustifiably high || Financial Times (registration required)
• Obama support for Boeing, GE and JPMorgan doesn’t always go both ways || Washington Post
• Global warming’s terrifying new math || Rolling Stone
• Swaps market open to Libor-like collusion || New York Times
• Are Millennials the screwed generation? || Daily Beast
• The one chart our politicians need to look at || The Atlantic
• Young workers push companies to locate in cities || Boston Globe
• Why high-speed rail could spawn a golden age in the Northeast || The Atlantic
• Five serious flaws of Bowles-Simpson || Economic Policy Institute
• Maugeri on peak oil || Econobrowser
• Not all economists are to blame, but some are || Economist’s View

  Today’s Econ Haiku:

  Taxing our patience

  Mitt won’t give out his returns

  ‘You people’ move on