4 ms·
> MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers. Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discuss
by adventured 3y ago
> MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers.
Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion.
$26 billion in quarterly operating income, about to overtake Apple in profit, and practically none of their growth over the past decade has come from desktop computers.
They have an extremely lucrative business across cloud everything these days and it has very little to do with Windows on the desktop.
Over the past decade that Windows desktop has largely been stagnant as a business, their total sales have gone from $78 billion to $218 billion. Operating income was stuck for 6-7 years in the ~$14-$22 billion range (the later Ballmer stagnation years), until after 2015. They'll cross $100+ billion in operating income over the next four quarters. All of that leap has happened from 2016 to now and basically none of it has to do with consumer Windows.
- rstuart4133 3y ago> Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion. My gut feeling is Microsoft is making money by moving old Active Directory servers into their own cloud offering, Azure. Their revenue is booming because they make more money from hosting a server than selling a Windows / MSSQL / Exchange licence that runs on someone elses hardware. To give them their due, they do it well, facilitating a smooth transition that allows you to move one machine at a time into the cloud, while the patient is still going about their normal business. That's all well and good, but it doesn't mean the proportion of people / businesses out there running Microsoft software is growing. Maybe it's dropping? I don't know. But if it is dropping, it's going to come to an ugly end in a few decades time.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoFair enough. They got in to the cloud business. Substantially behind AWS but ahead of Google Cloud. So I'll grant them that, which is good since "consumer Windows" is probably the fastest shrinking market in computing.
- vmfunction 3y agoyeah with the Jedi defence contract who knows how MS is actually making money. MS making money is NOT necessarily a good thing for users or their own share holders.