

Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year - dsdirect
http://www.webjives.org/microsoft-ecosystem-valued-at-580-billion

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encoderer
Pause for a moment to consider how much money that really is. How many people
in our industry have put bread on their table with their piece of that massive
pie.

That is, for example:

* About 19.33x bigger than the global music industry

* About 21.48x bigger than the global movie industry

* About 13.80x bigger than the global video game industry

* Nearly $100 from every man, woman and child alive today.

* About as big as the US Auto Industry (New Sales and Used Sales combined).

~~~
luckyfish
Just for reference, the IT industry revenues in 2010 were $1.5 trillion.

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rbranson
Most of these jobs and companies would still exist without Microsoft. They
would just be using and/or building around someone else's software and/or
platform.

~~~
rudiger
Not necessarily. I say this because Microsoft and their ecosystem are
exceedingly good at making money from selling software. If Microsoft didn't
exist, the ecosystem might be built around many more fragmented platforms.
They make $8.70 for every $1 that Microsoft makes; they might be making $100
dollars for every $1 in some parallel universe, and still making far less
money (because their platforms will be making far less than Microsoft does in
ours). And maybe people in that parallel universe don't pay for software; they
only pay for support ;)

~~~
rbanffy
OTOH, paying less for software would allow that parallel universe to be even
more efficient in their use of computers than we are on ours, spending less
money and getting more done with it.

Plus, by not having "Wintel" they would be less constrained to innovate in
hardware and software.

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astrofinch
Shouldn't the _valuation_ be some solid multiplier of the _annual revenue_ of
$580 billion?

~~~
hartror
The title should be:

 _Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year_

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rbanffy
Are they counting the spam zombie and phishing botnet industries into this
number? Microsoft made them possible... A malware industry would have a hard
time exploiting a diverse ecosystem like the one that existed prior to
Microsoft's dominance. No single computing platform had the 90%+ share
Microsoft has and writing multi-platform malware is hard. In fact, no single
platform had more than 50%.

Apart from that, this is not even blogspam (submitted by a bot, or a very
loyal, bordering obsessive, reader
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dsdirect>) - the post itself is so
small as to qualify it as a tweet. A tweet linking to a white paper sponsored
by Microsoft that appears not to even be mentioned on IDC's website.

But you can download it from Microsoft Presspass, of course.

[http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDC...](http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDCPartnerEcosystemPR.mspx)

edit: to all who say criticizing Microsoft brings good karma, this post serves
as a warning. Burn, karma, burn.

~~~
shadowfox
I sure did not get what you were trying to convey here :(

~~~
rbanffy
> Are they counting the spam zombie and phishing botnet industries into this
> number? Microsoft made them possible...

Various malware infection modes were impossible (not really - it was just that
nobody had been that stupid) before Microsoft invented ActiveX or started
passing e-mail through script-enabled browser rendering engines. I remember
making lots of e-mail virus jokes before Microsoft launched that Outlook 97
add-on (IIRC).

> A malware industry would have a hard time exploiting a diverse ecosystem
> like the one that existed prior to Microsoft's dominance. No single
> computing platform had the 90%+ share Microsoft has and writing multi-
> platform malware is hard. In fact, no single platform had more than 50%.

Malware economics are similar to off-the-shelf software - you target the
largest base. Without a base large enough to provide for quick and constant
reinfection, botnets would die quickly as its nodes are taken down or
recovered. To survive in a fragmented ecosystem, malware would have to be
cross platform and much more contagious and, therefore, harder to develop. If
you make malware development too costly, malware developers will find some
other criminal activity to do.

> Apart from that, this is not even blogspam (submitted by a bot, or a very
> loyal, bordering obsessive, reader
> <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dsdirect>) - the post itself is so
> small as to qualify it as a tweet. A tweet linking to a white paper
> sponsored by Microsoft that appears not to even be mentioned on IDC's
> website.

The article is a single paragraph pointing to a PDF of a white paper sponsored
by Microsoft downloaded from Microsoft's site that, surprisingly, shows
Microsoft as the great benefactor of the market.

> But you can download it from Microsoft Presspass, of course.

>
> [http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDC...](http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDC..).

These are self-explanatory.

> edit: to all who say criticizing Microsoft brings good karma, this post
> serves as a warning. Burn, karma, burn.

And so is this.

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scott_to_s
Whilst the figure is without doubt impressive, I can't help but wonder how
much of this figure is money lost by the poor customers that bought costly,
overly complex and hard to customise money-sinks that require specialists to
beat into shape...

* cough *

SharePoint

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pitdesi
Interesting. Has anyone seen similar results for other big companies (Apple &
Google would be great). A quick google search didn't turn up anything.

~~~
Jsmith018
Can't imagine either would be nearly as large, especially since Apple is
relativity closed to other and I can't even think of companies that could be
deemed as partners with Google.

Amazing how a company can be so interdependent with others all across the
world.

~~~
magsafe
I don't think Apple is as close as you may think initially. Steve Jobs
announced during the iPad2 keynote that devs have earned over $2b from selling
their apps on the App Store. Add to that all the artists and bands that
succeed by selling their music on iTunes. Plus all the podcasters that
wouldn't have been discovered if it wasn't for iTunes. Plus all the authors
selling books on the iBookstore. Plus the hundreds of small and large
companies making accessories, cases, adapters, covers, etc for iGadgets. Plus
all the big brands like Bose creating iPod compatible hi-fi equipment. All the
vehicles adding iPod dock support. Added up together, I'm not sure if it
matches Microsoft's ecosystem, but Apple's is probably in the tens of billions
of dollars.

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jpr
Am I the only one who is a little tired of the term "ecosystem" in the context
of technology?

~~~
vladd
Portability and standards are difficult things to build, and they cost
resources to develop, like anything else. Users don't understand the need for
them and would happily jump in IE6, Windows, iPads or a similar 'ecosystems'
until something bad happens and they see the open light
(Firefox/Linux/Android). But sometimes no alternative exists (open systems are
harder to monetize, and with fewer resources, they take longer to be built).
So we're left with a lot of ecosystems where things just work and nothing
'bad' happened yet.

It's a difficult issue and I don't see it going away by itself anytime soon.

~~~
Ratfish
Android open? Like honeycomb?

~~~
rbanffy
If Google decides, next week, they will stop releasing any of their own source
code (or whatever they borrowed from more-liberal-than-GPL licenses) you can
always just fork whatever they already released. You the user - even if you
also wrote the original code they based their product on - have no right to
demand the release of what they built. They release _if_ they want to.

Free Software is about that: it's about _your_ freedom.

