I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well.
In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media? Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing well anywhere except the increasingly unimportant desktop and Office suite space.
Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services...
It's easy to bash on them, but they make quality products in a diverse range of markets. Sure they fail and fail big, but who the hell doesn't? If you have made anything successful, you've probably failed 100s of times. It comes with the territory.
Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)
Are you only including developers, or all the people who work on a product? I imagine that MS has a rather large team of non-developers working on products as well.
You want to be careful with that metric. You know the cleaners don't make much money, why not fire them?
I did actually mean all the people that work in development on the product. That is, in MS terms, all SDE, SDET, and PMs. I happen to know this figure is accurate for Windows (over a million per developer), although that doesn't include sales/marketing, administrative costs, etc. As for the cleaners comment, I don't really get your point.
Anyway, my statistic wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, just proof that server is actually making money over here.
As I remember correctly, Office saves everything else at MS right now (by a large margin, followed by OSes). The gaming has recently been making more money than they are loosing (and will probably become their next important money maker). But the rest of the revenue makers are so low compared to those three that it's not even funny.
I suspect that they will probably announce service based offering (consulting) type in the long run (5-10 years maybe?) because they might not be able to sustain high margins of profit on Office and Windows sales due to competition and alternatives.
Right now they don't seem to have a great vision either, so we'll see were they are heading...
So I guess that we can say for sure (2009-2010 numbers) that online stuff is now loosing money, windows is now doing better that office, and gaming is quite behind but stable and profitable (albeit a lot less that office or windows). Let's be frank too, were talking about billions here, so those segments are quite big.
That's okay though - At least MS is smart enough to make an investment in a nascent technology. I bet everyone is losing money on the cloud, or barely breaking even.
Even Rackspace's Net Income is only 10 million dollars, coming off of 178 million dollars worth of revenue.
MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) has been a business component for them for a long time. Whereas someone like IBM-GS seeks to make as much margin as they can off the services side, MCS is in the unique position of being willing to make smaller margins because the licensing revenue is significant. That attitude has been changing in the past 5 years but it is still part of the MCS culture.
In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media? Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing well anywhere except the increasingly unimportant desktop and Office suite space.