Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 22

• Alphabet’s Earnings Miss Forecasts: European regulators brought the hammer down on Google this week, and investors barely blinked. But when the company’s first-quarter numbers came in a little light on Thursday afternoon, its stock immediately plummeted. Both revenue and profit rose sharply from 2015 but missed analysts’ forecasts. Revenue, at $20.26 billion, was about $120 million less than expected. Earnings per share, excluding certain items, were $7.50 when the consensus estimate was $7.96. The result: The stock fell about $46, or about 6 percent, in after-hours trading. Shares of Google were priced for perfection, and the first quarter was a little less than perfect. Whether that means anything substantive is more doubtful.Revenue from what the company calls “Other Bets” — including its fiber business and the Nest thermostat — was $166 million, more than double what it was in the first quarter of 2015. Losses for Other Bets rose to $802 million from $633 million. The number of employees jumped to 64,000 from 55,000 last year. “The vast majority” of them, the company stressed, were engineers and product managers. A question hanging over Google is its ventures in cloud computing. This is the growth market where Amazon is far ahead of everyone. Amazon Web Services is more exciting to investors than the retailer’s core business. Microsoft, meanwhile, is mounting an aggressive challenge. Google is far behind at No. 3, or perhaps even No. 4 after IBM, said John R. Rymer, an analyst at Forrester Research. Last fall, Google hired Diane Greene, an industry veteran, to run all of its cloud businesses.

• Microsoft’s Cloud Business, Seen as a Salvation, Falls Short of Investors’ Hopes: Cloud computing is seen by many investors as Microsoft’s salvation, the growing business that has convinced many there’s a bright future for the company beyond the troubled PC market. But Microsoft’s cloud business didn’t grow quite fast enough during its last quarter to keep investors happy. The company missed Wall Street estimates, though Microsoft executives said it would have beaten them without the impact of unexpectedly high taxes. For its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, Microsoft reported net income of $3.76 billion, or 47 cents a share, down from $4.99 billion, or 61 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue fell to $20.53 billion, from $21.73 billion. Microsoft’s traditional profit engines, like Windows, have weakened considerably as sales in the PC market have remained in a multiyear slump. Last week, the research firm Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter fell 9.6 percent from a year ago. Yet Microsoft has convinced many investors that it has found a way to adapt to technology changes, in part by vigorously embracing cloud computing. Shares of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., are still trading near their price in 1999, their high, even with a 5 percent drop in value Thursday evening. The optimism stems from its success in transitioning legacy software businesses like Office to a cloud business model in which customers subscribe to the applications. There are now 22.2 million subscribers to Office 365, the subscription version of its Office business, up from 12.4 million a year ago.

• Ev Williams’s Medium raised $57 million in September — now it’s raised another $50 million: You may have heard there’s a tech funding crunch, especially for companies that have yet to generate significant revenue. Not for Medium: The publishing platform says it raised another $50 million — just a few months after it raised $57 million. Update: Investors valued the company at $600 million in the current round, said a person familiar with the financing. This round was led by Spark Capital and includes previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. CEO Ev Williams, whose stake in Twitter has made him a billionaire, is also putting money into his own company

• Amazon is shutting down its Gilt Groupe competitor MyHabit: Another unhappy ending for a flash-sale shopping site. Three months after Gilt Groupe sold for a fraction of its valuation, Amazon has decided to shut down its fashion discount competitor MyHabit, according to a person familiar with the move. Amazon launched the website five years ago near the height of the flash-sale craze, but MyHabit has struggled in recent years as the one-time popular fashion niche has become less popular and Amazon has prioritized other fashion initiatives. Women’s Wear Daily reported employees have been told that the site will shutter at the end of May (subscription). In January, the CEO of MyHabit took on a new role at Amazon as general manager of its new private-label fashion business, according to his LinkedIn profile.Flash sales, on the other hand, has become an increasingly difficult business in recent years. The model exploded in popularity following the last recession, as designer brands were desperate to sell excess inventory in any way they could. But as the economy rebounded, there was less excess inventory to go around and some brands got smarter about how much inventory they produced.