Microsoft, though it tries again and again, just can't seem to break into new markets. They haven't conquered phones, consoles, music players, media centers, or search engines, and they don't seem to make much money on a product if they don't have monopoly control of a market.
If you look at this chart of MS profits, you can see that they're still making nearly all of their money from Office and Windows, with a decent slice of cash from servers, and nothing of note from anywhere else. The point is that all of Microsoft's big money makers are from old sectors that they seized control of in the 90s:
http://bit.ly/cnWlXq
Apple's biggest moneymaker is the iPhone, which didn't exist three years ago. Their third biggest is the iPod, which didn't exist ten years ago. Then comes the iTunes store, launched seven years ago. Over half of Apple's revenues come from projects which were launched in the past decade:
http://bit.ly/d0Bxtn
Next quarter you can add the iPad to the list of new Apple products that make lots of cash.
Microsoft is still making huge amounts of cash, it's just going nowhere fast, and investors are always more interested in the future than the present.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
