Microsoft is a Monster

[RyZ]

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?

[Winsor_Pilates]

Originally Posted by RyZ

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?

Not sure, but I know the head of Microsoft games has the most expensive house in Vancouver, so they can't be doing to bad.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by RyZ

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?

Here's figures from their annual...

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, profit increased to $4.71 billion (U.S.), or 50 cents per share, from $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share, in the year-ago period.


Revenue rose 31 per cent to $16.37 billion from $12.5 billion in the year-ago quarter, ahead of analysts' prediction of $15.95 billion.

And for the X360... (like they sell that many Zunes )

Sales from the division behind the Xbox 360 game console and Zune digital media player edged up 3 per cent to $3.06 billion. The division swung to a profit of $357 million from a loss of $302 million last year.

So about 19% of sales comes from X360. Didn't think it was that much....

One other interesting tidbit:

Microsoft's "client" division, responsible for Vista, posted revenue of $4.34 billion. It has sold 100 million copies of Vista since its January 2007 launch.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by I-Hate-Hulse

<snip>

Sales from the division behind the Xbox 360 game console and Zune digital media player edged up 3 per cent to $3.06 billion. The division swung to a profit of $357 million from a loss of $302 million last year.

So about 19% of sales comes from X360. Didn't think it was that much....

<snip>

That's an impressive turn-around for the XBOX division. I bet next years numbers won't be so rosey though due to the warranty issues.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by llama64

That's an impressive turn-around for the XBOX division. I bet next years numbers won't be so rosey though due to the warranty issues.

By accounting rules, they should have setup a liability for this and expensed it last year - so no impact for 2008 unless the problem is worse than they originally provided for.

But components will get cheaper, so profit could increase even more, especially if Gears of War 2 gets released soon.

[Regorium]

I'm an XP holdout, but the more I play around with Vista on my GF's laptop the more I want to upgrade.

Everything's set up just right on my current computer right now and I just don't want to mess with it!

[I_H8_Crawford]

My laptop died so have been messing around with Vista on a new laptop... once you turn off that ######ed security that asks if you want to do something 5x it isn't that bad; I don't mind it... definitely not the horror story you hear from everywhere.

[Red]

Originally Posted by I_H8_Crawford

My laptop died so have been messing around with Vista on a new laptop... once you turn off that ######ed security that asks if you want to do something 5x it isn't that bad; I don't mind it... definitely not the horror story you hear from everywhere.

Funny thing is that my Vista only asks me once.

This is how Vista gets its bad rep, people exaggerate things and the masses just keep repeating them.

[4X4]

Originally Posted by Regorium

I'm an XP holdout, but the more I play around with Vista on my GF's laptop the more I want to upgrade.

Everything's set up just right on my current computer right now and I just don't want to mess with it!

I wouldn't call myself a holdout, just someone that didn't need to upgrade. My desktop is 5 years old and my laptop ain't broke so I'm not going to fix it.
My dad just developed his basement into an office and put a couple new machines in there that both run vista. I have to say that I like Vista. It was soo easy to set everything up. The only tricky think was setting up the network so that all the computers in the house can print (the main computer still runs XP).

But yeah, Vista isn't the boogeyman program that I thought it was going to be. Actually pretty nice.

[Jagger]

I'm running Vista Premium 64 on my new(ish) laptop. I have had a few compatibility problems with both drivers and software. I simply cannot get my GPS60cs or Palm to sync with it so have to use one of our XP desktops. Certain new games (Hoyle card games for one) will not run normally on Vista, no matter what the packaging says. You can get it to run via a back door method but it's a pain.

After saying that, I still like Vista and given the choice would not want to go back to XP. It's certainly better than the bad reviews it gets, and this is coming from somebody who has actually had problems with it.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by llama64

That said, your "Golf Course" customer should have verified that their mission critical apps could run on the new OS before they upgraded to it. They also should be leaning on the developers to get off their ass and fix the software to run properly on the new platform. The specs for Vista were out a long time before it was released.

They didn't WANT to upgrade, but their standard laptop no longer comes with XP, so they have a choice of either changing laptop vendors (which defeats the purpose of standardization, and causes me headaches) or..... hmmm.

Saying "well they should do this" or "they should do that" is missing the point entirely. If Vista wasn't forced down their throats, they wouldn't have to do ANYTHING at all, as their current needs are already met by XP. For that matter, I'd say I have exactly 0% of customers who "need" to upgrade to Vista - it's a solution in search of a problem.

There is nothing at all about it that makes me think, "Wow, I could sure use this to solve (whatever)." The "security" model is the only thing I see as an improvement, and frankly, that could have been retrofitted to XP without much trouble, so I'm not seeing the big value in paying hundreds of dollars for it, especially as corporate networks have their machines locked down with system policies anyway, which does 90% of what this feature is supposed to do.

Not one of my customers - not one - has embraced Vista. And these range from little 10-20 user shops, to companies with hundreds of desktops. Why? Because, as I said, it just causes problems, and it doesn't solve any, and any sane business doesn't go down that path if they don't have to.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by jammies

They didn't WANT to upgrade, but their standard laptop no longer comes with XP, so they have a choice of either changing laptop vendors (which defeats the purpose of standardization, and causes me headaches) or..... hmmm.

Saying "well they should do this" or "they should do that" is missing the point entirely. If Vista wasn't forced down their throats, they wouldn't have to do ANYTHING at all, as their current needs are already met by XP. For that matter, I'd say I have exactly 0% of customers who "need" to upgrade to Vista - it's a solution in search of a problem.

I agree fully with you. Microsoft tried to do exactly what it's done in the past by forcing everyone to the next platform.

But the problem still remains at the business IT level. If the applications needed to run a business cannot be run properly on the Vista platform, they shouldn't have upgraded. Accepting a vendor that refuses to meet your needs is bad management, regardless if it causes headaches. Or are you saying that the problems being created by Vista are less of a headache then finding a decent hardware vendor?

Even at launch there were computer vendors that still shipped products with XP installed.

[Regorium]

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080201/microsoft_yahoo.html

They truly are monstrous. Everyone thinks the economy is terrible, and Microsoft offers 45 billion dollars for an acquisition.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Vista SP1 should be out by the end of the month...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,14...n/article.html

[mykalberta]

Smart money says buy when the seller is weak, I personally would have waited, I am waiting before I turn a large chunk of my PC Financial cash into stocks because the market and certain industries in particular have a lot longer way to fall.

[McG]

i haven't yet wrapped my head around how much better microsoft will be with yahoo...more to the point that it didn't go to google...which m$ says it couldn't have.

maybe they didn't want to buy SAP any more?

[jammies]

Originally Posted by McG

maybe they didn't want to buy SAP any more?

They probably figured out that combining the legendary SAP lack of quality with world-class Microsoft buffoonery wasn't a good plan.

Seriously, I don't know how SAP manages to sell even one piece of software - any implementation I've ever heard of has always been WAY over budget (including one place that was spending over ONE MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH in consultants trying to get it to be more or less workable) and using it feels like you're inside a Kafka novel, being berated by an insane bureaucrat in pig Latin while perverted clowns pummel you with rubber chickens.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by McG

i haven't yet wrapped my head around how much better microsoft will be with yahoo...more to the point that it didn't go to google...which m$ says it couldn't have.

There's no way a Google / Yahoo merger gets approved by the anti-trust regulators - too much of a monopoly on search and advertising. Google had to sit by and watch Redmond move in.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by droopydrew19

vista just seems to be a resource hog. My older laptopwith 1 gig of ram zooms running xp compared to my new (faster processor) with 1.5 gigs of ram and vista.

Yeah, and I bet your previous machines "zoomed" with Windows 98 compared to Windows 2000 when it came out. XP was famously "a hog" when it came out, too, compared to Win98 and Windows 2000.

Fact of the matter is that Vista is doing a lot more under the hood than any of the previous OSs did, the same as it's been with each generation.

BTW, it's the same for Macs, Leopard is undeniably fatter than Tiger, all you have to do is look at how much more it uses the swapfile, which is significantly more. The only real difference is that most Mac users already had a gig or more of RAM before they upgraded.

-Scott

[jammies]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Fact of the matter is that Vista is doing a lot more under the hood than any of the previous OSs did, the same as it's been with each generation.

Should it be doing more "under the hood", though? You know what would have impressed me as a new release of Windows? If they had taken XP, dropped its memory footprint down by a third, tightened the security, cut the bootup time in half, increased the speed, increased the stability, and left the interface alone except for maybe some snazzy transparency effects. And done it in late 2005/early 2006.

We don't *need* an OS that takes up hundreds of megs of memory just to run, and we don't *need* any more "features". What we *do* need is stability, security and usability. MS should move to something like a 3 release cycle over a 6-8 year period - first release you incorporate most of your innovations, next two releases are evolutionary and are intended to streamline and stabilize the OS, not fatten it.