Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is about to get beyond the somewhat negative press of the Paul Allen behind it.  The software giant reports today after the close.  Thomson Reuters has estimates for its third fiscal quarter of 2011 as $0.56 EPS and $16.19 billion in revenues.  We have prepared a full preview for today’s earnings and brought into consideration many of the peers and the fundamentals, as well as a
ddressed what the stock chart is saying, what analysts are thinking, and what options traders are considering.

Microsoft will offer guidance for the current quarter and that will shape up against estimates of $0.60 EPS and $17.38 billion.  Thomson Reuters has its consensus estimates at $2.56 EPS and $69.65 billion in revenues for the Fiscal-2011.  Everyone will want to draw inference here on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), but Apple has stalled as far as a stock.  Due to Apple’s growth of the last year and due to the perpetual dead-money stance of Microsoft as a stock, Apple still has nearly $100 billion more in market capitalization per our own Real-Time 500 monitoring of the 500 largest companies by market cap.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all is Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC).  Intel managed to beat earnings and maintain above-consensus guidance in a manner that stunned everyone.  The belief on Wall Street and Main Street was that Intel would warn ahead.  This supports the notion that WinTel alliance could be a dup win.  Another issue is Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), where Microsoft is actually winning back some search share with Bing.  Its partnership with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) ran into some technical difficulties in the first quarter, but this is supposed to be part of what is helping Microsoft.

We would always worry that perhaps Japan will be an issue for Microsoft.  So far, the damage to business there has not seemed to be as deep as the fears were initially. The company is a quarter past the Kinect hype, but we have to wonder about all these reports on slowing PC sales due to smartphones and tablets taking all of the steam.  Neither Intel nor Microsoft have been big beneficiaries of this tablet-PC and smartphone growth.  Still, the same logic was being used by many for Intel and they managed to say that those figures might not be as grim as the headlines may have suggested.

What is perhaps more interesting than anything ahead is that Intel’s gains last week actually helped along with a strong market enough that a technical event took place.  The stockcharts.com stock chart will show you here that its 50-day and 200-day moving averages crossed while Microsoft’s stock price was not really able to get above or stay above that 200-day moving average.  Now the stock is up 6% in the last two weeks around $26.50.  We view support likely being down at those averages now.  The 200-day moving average is $25.88 and the 50-day moving average is $25.84.  If the news creates a technical violation, then we’d look for additional support down closer to $25.50 and then around $25.00 if there is a real disappointment.  As far as resistance on the chart, Microsoft could see shares run to $27.00 and then to $27.50 before much harder resistance comes into play around $27.80 to $28.10.  Just keep in mind that a $1.00 share price move in either direction today will actually add or take away more than $8 billion of market capitalization in Microsoft.