Bolded; uhh, what does that even mean? In the famous words of Ledger's joker: "Why so serious?"

Well, this financial quarter results just shows that at nearly 4 years old, the XB360 is still not a profitable business, and at this rate, will never break even.
I'm not surprised: MS was never able to compete in any market. If they don't have their monopoly to help them (Windows and its apps), they fail miserably as always, and always take down their partners with them.
The outcome till now is abysmal: $6+ or $9 billions in the hole depending on what you include, lots of internal studios closed, lots of 3rd parties going down with them, some game genres nearly destroyed, a new low on console IQ, introduction of pay to play online, ...

All of that for nearly nothing. What is alarming is that they had part of their monopoly to help them, in the form of Direct X.
MS has to release a new console next gen anyway, to keep Direct X as the default for games. If the other consoles were to become dominant, OpenGL would rise with it, and Direct X would fade. They already lost the codec war on video codec for optical media (BluRay won, destroying MS chances to install its WMV/WMA formats, and allowing H264 and Apple Quicktime to shine), and on audio codec and container (Apple QuickTime and AAC), they can't afford to lose the grip on game middleware too.

XB360 was losing so much money that they quickly put the division among the other entertainment profitable business, to hide the heavy losses. Zune, Media Center, Mobile, ..., they are all profitable or very profitable. They bring less revenue but at least are profitable. Of course, XBox is the sole area that is losing money in this division.
They cut the price, and the previously barely profitable division went in the hole again. But they had to, they didn't even sell as many consoles as the previous fiscal year, despite cutting the price before the holidays.

Blue- People post predictions by Pachter (not gebx... but yaknow), that means im allowed to post some guys small rant. Its brought up good discussion and earned me some easy VG$, so quit complaining... if you disagree, fine, 99% of sane people probably agree with you, but please stop crying about it.

Red- Didn't he ask to get banned?

Green- While they post nonsense half of the time, they dont go about trolling the other consoles, at least from what ive seen... hence they shouldnt be banned. People ARE allowed an opinion yaknow.

What a silly deluded thread......

Lets see: The zune isn't released worldwide because I believe Balmer said that it would lose them more money to do so. Media Center? I don't really see that as being an area of high revenue, Windows mobile was barely breaking even before the iPhone and massive investment to compete. They made all of 5M before they joined it with E+D.

Xbox 360 revenue = 5.6B

Cost of revenue for Xbox 360 and others = 4.3B

R+D = 1.8B

Believe what you want, but at least back up your statements with some evidence.

Was This Taken From The HipHopGamer?

Man, be real. Gebx was banned - self request at the end - but got banned for creating troll threads that weren't even trolling but real news, not a random blogger. What kind of responses did you expect? It's some biased opinion - in the MS thread - that's pure rubbish. If anyone did this consistently in the Sony thread, they'd be banned. You know it. Starcraft is the only one brave enough - and with enough time - to post stuff like this - or real news about Sony.

I see the double standard plain and simple. Others do too. You may not, but the stuff posted by Gebx was news, whether the powers that be didn't think so. Doesn't matter much, though. Sanitize the news on this site - but facts are facts. Post propaganda to make you and others feel good, but it's not the truth, just like this dandy you pulled. It's a PS3 bot's wet dream at best.

LOL, you people are always full of it.

Your big reference Steve Ballmer said exactly the contrary : http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2006/tc20061011_940241.htm

There, I'll extract it for you :

BW : How much money will you lose per Zune?

Steve Ballmer : None.

I'll take that from the horse's mouth instead of what you want to "believe".

And that was in 2006, I'm pretty sure that with cost reductions, they're profitable in 2009 on Zune, or they couldn't be profitable with XBox either.

You can make all the speculation you want, they hid Xbox in another division to mask the heavy losses they were having with it, and it's still the case. MS is a master at marketing and financial schemes, that's for sure.

But don't worry, they'll release a console Next Gen, they have to, just as they have to make Windows Mobile or Zune, or even promise people a search engine that will destroy Google (that was years ago).

But they fail miserably in everything, every segment where they have to compete. They just don't know how to compete.

It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't that they don't care one bit for their customers.

In most of their business, the customer is not YOU BTW. It's a common misconception. For example, with XBox, the customers are the developers, not the console's final user. They don't care about them, thus why the console has the worst quality ever due to a design flaw that they won't correct, just workaround. That's why they asked developers what they wanted, not gamers. That's why they close even 1st party game studios of which they don't even have a lot, that's why they don't hesitate to make credulous people pay to play online, while the same service is free on PCs, ...

I mean it's obvious unless one bury its head in the sand.

If it plays out like always with MS products users, there will be some big disappointment in the end, when they finally realise (if ever) that MS doesn't care about them.

^...and the insinuation is that Nintendo and Sony care more about the consumer? I hate this image portrayed by many that MS is the scum between your teeth.

I think what Squil is referencing is that many of the products/services engulfed within the division are currently in a transitional period. The new unreleased Zune HD for instance would have had R&D costs which means that it would report a loss for the quarter - Windows Mobile 7 is still in development/surface computing/new version of office etc. I don't think you can say that everything else in the division is 'profitable'.

Sure the evidence is there from a financial perspective that MS entering the console market as a means to make money has thus far failed miserably. But as many have already pointed out it was more than that - it was a means to protect their other investments from competition, counter pc-game pirating, and to eventually be the one device that 'controls the living room'. The new partnerships and features keep bringing it closer to the goal and force their competitors to continue to spend big to emulate their services, which will spread their reserves thin - another repeat of this gen and it will be Sony who can't afford it. Then everyone will know why they're persisting.

It was my understanding that the MS developed VC-1 codec is used just as much, if not more than H.264 for Blu-ray movies?

woooww @ ookaze

every microsoft segments (major & minor) are total failures , yet they reap out loads n loads of profits annually.