Washington Post: Investors Want Microsoft’s New CEO to Kill Xbox, Bing and Surface

[fleischr]

Soundwave said:

fleischr said:

Nem said:
Maybe Nintendo should buy the Xbox division from Microsoft. lol

Seriously though, i am thinking that its a a strong possibility that Microsoft kills the Xbox. The X1 is not doing well in europe and has no chance in Japan. It will be a 1 region console and even on that region its losing to Sony. For the situation to change, Microsoft is gonna need to take losses on the X1. Will they be willing to? Or will they just kill it?

I wonder...

I don't think MS's board can tolerate losses on the gaming division any longer. But they may find another company foolish enough to partner in spinoff effort that will take the losses.

LOL, the gaming divisions losses are nothing, MS generates billions of profit each quarter gaurunteed. They've made more money in the last 3 months than Sony has in the last 10 years combined. 

The thing with investors is they can be short sighted. MS is kinda damned if they do/damned if they don't ... if they try to branch out with ventures like XBox and Surface some investors will cry about not making immediate monster profits, even though the company as a whole makes incredible profit year after year. 

But on the other hand you have the Apple scenario ... another company that's wildly profitable, yet their investors are crying because Apple isn't branching out enough with other products. 

MS could ditch the XBox, but in 10 years, their investors may be crying about why MS just sat around and watched Windows become irrelevant and didn't follow through on things like Surface and XBox. 

The last quarter was in fact their best ever -- but the legacy of Xbox on the financial side of things is not pretty. The gaming division didn't become profitable until 2010/2011, nearly 10 years into the Xbox brand's existence. A good lump of the profit actually comes from Android and Skype royalties, which have little to do with how profitable Xbox itself is.

If MS cedes the enterprise market because they were busy making games, I'm pretty certain the investors would be peeved about that.