Kyros on 22 July 2008
Business is business. Successful companies adapt, beg, borrow and steal.
No they don't! This only works for a while in a real market.
Give to the customer, what the customer wants!
Is still the main business sentence and the basis for a long successful live as a business. Customers may be stupid but if they start to loose trust in a company you have a huge problem. So you may make more money by being the company equivalent of an asshole but this won't last.
So but why is Microsoft so profitable then and has been for years? Because its a damn monopoly. IT makes almost all of its profit with its Operating System and Office products both of which have essentially no competition to fear because MS has 95% of the market in both.
In almost all sectors where this doesn't help them they suck. Their Zune player is a failure. XBOX a huge money sink. Online they are killed by Google. Their mobile OS plays second fiddle to Symbian and has a bleak future against Android and Apple.
They are modestly successful in databases and web servers (after years of losses and suckitude in both) and have great development tooling with Visual Studio but this is peanuts.
