Slate:

That's all about their fourth quarter earnings report where both revenues and profits came in billions of dollars below Wall Street expectations. Even more disturbing, the company acknowledged $900 million of inventory write downs based on Surface RT machines. That's when a company acknowledges, for accounting purposes, that they aren't actually going to be able to sell products they've already built so the inventory doesn't have the value they originally attributed to it anymore. That matters not just because of the $900 million but because of what it says about the company's ability to escape the steady decline of the traditional PC form factor, especially as ultra-cheap Chromebooks start attacking the low end of the shrinking market.