City. The city has been relatively desolate. The only people out there are the people plowing the sidewalks at this point. We walked over ourselves this morning. Didnt get hit with anything much but the ban on cars in new york city still is accurate. Ill wait until the posts in other places start making fun of the weather people because its still a very serious storm. May be loss of life somewhere. In fact if you take a look at some of the pictures in new england its a different story. Wow this is a picture of philadelphia. There could be more to come. Still falling there. You look at i looked at my radar thing on activitiescuweather. Its moving northeast and most of it is there. In the northeast region up in new england bracing for 3 feet as snow. They have been getting as much as 4 inches an hour. With the hurricane forced winds causing wide out conditions. Its been a huge issue with coastal flooding too. I was just reading that theyre talking about storm surges of about 7 feet with some flooding already taking place. Thats a big concern up and down the coast and well have wide reports in just a moment. But first other big stories we have been watching this morning. Now that the roads are clear all the people that claim theyre not going to work today do they decide theyre going to open them later . Schools are done today. Out in the streets themselves we vn seen as many snowplows coming by. Everybody our newspapers arent here. Those guys have their feet up. What are you kidding . Wed be taking advantage of it too if we could. Over at the hotel, no maid service today. Horrors. Well theyre not going to clean the room no room service last night. No way to get any food. Because the roads were shutdown and subway systems were shutdown. I think i told you any theory. Whats your theory . That if it had been really bad that could have been Climate Change caused the adverse weather but because it wasnt that bad thats because of global warming. So the warming warmed it up so it wasnt as bad. So either way too nice a morning. Its too early. Oh im sorry andrew. I think thats what happened. Had it been really big, thats when you use the Climate Change. Having not been that was dont you think . I think its business as usual. I think its what we live through every winter. We cant do 24 to 36 hours forecast that well but 24 to 36 years were much better at being accurate. Could be. I will take the less than expected with no complaints. Theres places im sure are getting it a lot worse like there always is. In the meantime beyond the blizzard this morning earnings in the economy are the name of the game on wall street today. Dupont just hitting the tape. Looks like earnings and revenue beat from the dow component. Theyll happily take that one given whats going on trying to get into that company. Also before the bell well hear from pfizer Procter Gamble caterpillar among others. Also the home price index. New home sales, Consumer Confidence and the fed survey so even though its a snow day a lot of things going on and in washington this morning fed policy members are going to be gathering for the first fomc meeting of the year. Its a two day gallery with a decision due tomorrow afternoon. They have not closed that down yet. Yet is the word. Were looking at some of the things well talk about in shares. I wonder if theyre all the way back down now. You know they shut the city down. Right. Overnight. Stories well talk about later. Ill bet theyre back down. I should tell you, i bet you the supply last night to the audience that doesnt know we all stayed in a hotel because we were worried about the snow. I ubered to the hotel dont use it as a verb please. I thought we were going to have crazy surge pricing. Services suspended until further notice. Youre not allowed to be driving. Yeah. On the streets of new york city. Anyway among the stocks to watch today microsoft posting earnings and revenue both in line with estimates. Sluggish pc sales hurt demand for windows software. Still look at the revenue number because its always a number any other person has trouble. Sales have been at 14 year highs along with inobstetrical. And Texas Instruments matching wall street expectations. Growing demand for the auto industry. United technology posing line for forecasts but lowering four year guidance. Get used to that utc to rise about 52 of sales outside the United States. So that makes sense. We need an anchor here. They said to go ahead and read with this. We are watching the markets this morning and yesterday the markets barely budged. Probably because people were so focused on the snowstorm here potentially in the United States. The dow traded in 129 point range and believe it or not thats the lightest range weve seen so far this year. The nasdaq was up for the 6th straight session and if it closes higher today which doesnt look likely at the moment but if it does close higher that will be the longest winning streak for the nasdaq since all the way back to february of last year. Right now the dow futures are down by about 70 points. In some of the early trading in wrurp youll see similar delines. The dax is down by half a per cent with similar declines in france and london. Overnight in asia with the asian stock markets the nikkei closed up. Hang seng by. 4 . Oil prices dropped by 1 . They hung in there around the 45 level and settled at the lowest level since march of 2009. This morning up about 18 cents for wti. The ten year note is going to be interesting to check out the 30 year treasury. The yield hit record lows falling below 2. 34 . The dollar in terms of the currency markets youll see the dollar is down against the euros. Still all the way down at 11272. And if you want to check out gold prices at least at this point it looks like gold prices are up slightly. 1,000, 1,281 an ounce. Lets get to the story of the morning, the blizzard. Morgan joins us now from new yorks times square where she is hanging out in a little bit of the snow. Not too much snow. Morgan. Reporter good morning guys. Its cold out here and windy and you can see its still snowing though the snow slowed down significantly. As of 1 00 a. M. Last night here in manhattan we had 6. 1 independence from lands of snow. The forecast 8 to 12 inches for manhattan and new york city. Thats significantly lower than what was initially anticipated. Out in queens we had 10 inches of snow as of 1 00 a. M. And now the National Weather service is downgrading its blizzard warning for new york city to a storm warning but it is still in place. That blizzard warning out in long island but guys keep in mind it isnt just the snowfall. It has been high winds that had everyone concerned over the last 24 hours. Thats why we had 8 governors declare states of emergency. Maine, new hampshire, massachusetts, i ri connecticut, pennsylvania new jersey and the lower part of new york state. We have seen major highways closed down. We had travel bans put in place in multiple states and here in new york city not only did the streets close at 11 00 p. M. Local time last night but so did public transforation. Subways, commuter trains buses. Now that doesnt happen often in new york city. So the issue now is as the snow is starting to slow down and the blizzard warning is scaled back in the city whats going to happen with the transportation and slow downs throughout the Northeastern Region . We should start to get answers on that this morning. We have andrew cuomo holding a press conference at 8 00 a. M. Today and more coming from other government officials later on in the morning. Back to you. All right. Found a little snow there. Its cold as you pointed out. Thank you. Thousands of flights have been cancelled throughout the northeast but at new yorks jfk passengerers got stuck on an outbound Virgin Atlantic flight and had to sit on the tarmac for about six hours as they dealt with the icing and sick passenger. They were then sent back after all that to the terminal. And our hotel room is looking a little roomier and roomier. It is. Yeah. I was watching some hoops. I did go down and i was able to bring in some food. I got it myself. I just miss everybody. New yorks airport was closed completely and thats where we find kate rogers. Hi kate good morning. Good morning to you, joe, thats right. Pretty much closed down. Weve only seen a few people here this morning. A few stranded passengers and a few loan workers here. Flight aware. Com is reporting that between yesterday, today, and tomorrow theres over 7,000 flights completely cancelled. Wednesdays cancellations around 300 so far but that number likely to increase as the day goes on and the snow continues to fall. Now la now its a ghost town. No one here but a few stranded passengers. United has a few workers at their booth. Theyre saying theyre here just in case. The kiosks here all say not in service this morning and theres a few dozen passengers stranded here overnight but being taken care of in a separate part of the airport. Boston logan is still the only one to officially shutdown last night at 7 00 p. M. Last night continuing into today but Major Airline carriers saying no flights getting in or out of the newark new jersey or philadelphia areas. Everybody sit tight. Thats the message. Lets get a check on how retailers could be impacted by this winter storm. Joining us right now is budd budd bugatch. Hes the managing director at raymond james. We saw yesterday how some of the stock is trading higher as People Get Ready for the storm. We know this is the knee jerk reaction this time around. What does it mean for home depot or lowes. It doesnt mean much on the continuing basis or longterm basis. Every storm is different. Theres three phases. Theres the preparation phase which in this case was pretty short. The first weather advisory i saw was on saturday and then the event itself which is a drag because the stores will be closed for a period of time and the 400 stores for home depot in this area that will be the biggest impact and then theres the aftermath and in hurricane or super storm sandy, we saw for home depot about 500 million in the four quarters afterwards of improved sales. This will be nowhere near that but i dont get very excited about these kind of events for these retailers. Theres a whole menu of reasons why you want to own these retailers. Had isnt ranking high on one of them. Lets talk about what you think about these retailers in general . Bhast whats a reason you should own them . Theyre Great Companies. The shareholders are always served well by these companies. The suppliers and the community of course and in events like this and from the financial side you see expanding margins. You see improving sales as the economy continues to recover and they return to Share Repurchase and dividends. You see a lot of reasons why you want to own them. These are certainly world Clas Companies and the stocks already reflect that. Theyre selling over 20 times forward earnings and theyre at the highs of their historical ranges so its hard to want to put new money into these names but you want to own them because theyre Great Companies and if you want exposure to the Housing Market and great retailer and Great Companies theres no other places to go. Budd thank you for your time today. Great talking to you. Thank you, becky. Coming up the street reacts to microsofts Quarterly Results in earnings. Why is the stock under a little pressure this morning . First though, check out the shares of dupont. Beat by the profit forecast that sell fell short and check out these live pictures from philadelphia. Someone is using a snow blower. Squawk box will be right back on a stormy winter morning. Stay tuned. Sandwich massachusetts. They have heavy snow still coming down there. Northeast of us apparently. And thats some serious wind action. Yeah another 10 to 15 inches is still expected in boston. We got 8. Thought we were getting 30. We did not. My vo soft earnings in line with expectations expectations. Revenues did Beat Estimates but the shares fell after the bell after the tech giant warned about the currency market. Joining us is robert with stern ag. He covers that stock. That couldnt normally cause a strong to sell off just because of a strong dollar would it . Theres three things. The foreign currency is going to create a hangover effect for the next three or four quarters. We also have the sp upgrade cycle which ended last marchand we have to anniversary that for the next three quarters and longer term microsoft is undergoing a transactional business to more of a subscription model and thats also going to create a headwind. Those are whats going to hurt the stock here as analysts continue to reduce their estimates going forward. What was the revenue number . It came in slightly above the numbers. It was at 26 billion. 26. 3. In a quarter. 26 billion in a quarter. Not bad. I missed that xp upgrade. I dont know somehow it was below the radar for me but didnt workout, right . But they still did 26 billion in revenue in a quarter. Correct. Its very powerful and great cash flow machine. As the Company Transitions this transactional revenue. You might miss this one as well because it flies under the radar. But if you moved and lets say you signed a 100 million deal at the end of the quarter, under the transactional model you would recognize all of it. Under the subscription model only 1 million of it. It has a dampening effect in the shortterm but its a great longer term model because its more predictable. What happened in the last year and a half . We had ten years of almost a trading range. Did the earnings per share just catch up with the multiple or was there something that changed that got the stock finally out of the dog house . Well one, the sp upgrade cycle only occurs about every ten years so thats one thing and then the other thing was obviously the change in management and leadership. A much more focused management kind of moving to where the puck is going to be in terms of moving to the cloud. Moving to mobile and moving the model underneath it toward that multiple. It should outpace over the last ten years. Did you have a buy on it . Do you have one now . Were neutral on the stock so once i join sterne agee about a year ago we were neutral. We saw this fundamental shift in terms of where revenue and earnings were going to be so were near term here cautious. As estimates come down across the street were likely to get more constructive as we go forward and the company navigates these tough shortterm head winds. So this is now a Cloud Company or still totally dependent on pcs . I dont think thats a bad thing. We have michael dell talking to us. The demise of the pc was greatly exaggerated too. Theres two components. One for microsoft on the enterprise side. Its probably the most rock solid area and then when you look at the consumer business which would be about 35 of the total revenue thats still going to undergo some transition but the pc market is definitely important but both of those are moving in tandem to the cloud. Both for the consumer and the enterprise as office 365 was up over 114 this last quarter. So theyre definitely getting significant momentum moving the applications. At the end of the day what microsoft wants you to do is use their applications whether thats Microsoft Office or excel or word they want you using it at work and at home in every format whether thats a pc tablet or phone. When you look at the new windows 10 theyre trying to eun pie the whole experience for the developer where he or she can write an application on windows 10 and it can be deployed across all three devices simultaneously. The margin has to come down on all of those things because the problem is it used to be we buy three different versions of it and now they give parts of it away from free. Isnt that the problem . I dont know if its a problem, but isnt that the issue . Margins will definitely come down as we move to the cloud revenues. That will have a dampening effect over the next one the two years but coming out the side should be better. Microsoft will introduce new pricing strategies. You can buy a discounted version for home. Theyll introduce new pricing strategies to entice you to purchase them across your devices devices. All right. Thank you. If you write a program you dont need to do you really did. That is a benefit to be able to write one program and it goes across all the different devices. Yeah and for people that already have max you write a note on your iphone and it will show up on your ipad. It will be everywhere. The world has passed me by. I guess you guys already know that mostly. You have an iphone. You know what were talking about. I do but i dont know what amazes me is theres still so much Microsoft Software that people dont have that they still, 26 billion, thats 26,000 million. Thats because every time you buy a new laptop you need software that goes with it. Even if you have an apple device most people still buy microsoft. Even Microsoft Office. What are you doing after the show . Can we go somewhere and talk about all of this. We can definitely walk down the street. Theres no snow. Maybe we could hang out at the genius bar together. We have a little bit of tech news for you this morning. If youre stuck looking inside looking to pass time hanging out on facebook you may have had an issue last night. Facebook instagram and tender were among several networking sites that suffered outages. It was caused by a technical change made on the site and not a result of a cyberattack but a Hacking Group claiming responsibility on twitter for the outages. I just thought it was so many people at home trying to get on at the same time. If you were on tender that doesnt help you. You heard what i said. The one night everybody really needed tender. Youre stuck inside. Isnt there a geographic component to it . You get stuck there and you cant leave. Youre always thinking. When we come back this morning, a live report from new england. Right now new england is still getting pounded by this blizzard. Well talk more about that. Plus well talk about the Economic Impact of what some say could be a historic storm. First as we head to a break, take a look at the s p 500 winners and losers. She inspires you. No question about that. But your e