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landguy1 on 19 July 2013
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Soleron said:
DirtyP2002 said:
...


I think this logic is a big problem on VGC.

Microsoft does not generate its revenues from being Microsoft. MS is that successful because 9 out of 10 times they make the right choice.
As Kowe said they make bets / investments / experiments or whatever you want to call it all the time. Xbox was such a experiment and it paid off.

Azure was an investment 3 years ago and it became a huge success. Office 365 is doing really well, too.

Are you living on a different planet? Online Services is still making big losses; EDD is making a loss.

None of their bets/experiments using Windows/Office have ever paid off, ever. You may call them a success by other metrics (supporting Windows pervasiveness) but not financial.

Their choices are only right for a product that has ~90% marketshare. Any other market they fail hard time after time.

Like for example their response to this is an expensive redesign of RT tablets. I expect a $900m writedown on that gen as well in a few months. The best thing to do would be to scrap it and focus on bringing full Windows down to a competitive price, size and weight.

I won't claim to be any more expert than you, but have a different opinion.  Even though M$ wrote down $900 million on the surface RT, it wasn't a complete failure that you seem to think.  M$ is making a long term investment in Windows RT(the OS for Surface RT), as they are using that same operating system on the XBone and they are converging it with the Windows phone OS.  The Surface RT write down is being done mostly to push out the gen 1 devices from the sales channel and make way for the revised products to hit market in the next few months.  M$ is hoping to slow or stop their slide into obselesence by jumping full into the next generation of operating systems - Windows 8 and Windows RT/Windows Phone 8.  If you haven't tried windows 8.1, it is a nice tune up to Win8 and fixes most(not all) of the nagging problems with such a drastic change from the previous version of windows.  You are probably right that M$ will lose another load of $$$ this year on Surface products, but that amount will be reduced.  Also, M$ is alos trying to build market share through not only their Surface products, but the dozens of other manufacturers that have and are releasing Windows RT products.  So, they might lose a bundle on surface itself, but because they are building a new tablet presense through their products and the other vendors products, they win in the long run.