Microsoft made a profit again!

[TheBigFatJ]

rocketpig said:

TheBigFatJ said:

WiiStation360 said:

Think of the $1B RROD charge for MS like a $1B charge for PS3 Cell/hardware R&D. They take a one time charge and do not average it out over the life of the console.

 

But Sony isn't doing Cell/hardware R&D for the PS3. Microsoft is still repairing tons of Xbox 360s all of the time. And they're still selling Xbox 360s that break/rrod.

 

So what? MS already took the hit on their Entertainment division, knowing that the money would last much longer than one year.

Think of it this way: A console gets produced on March 1st. It gets sold to retailer (meaning MS gets their money) on April 1st. The cost was in a previous quarter but the profit was in the next quarter.

Is that profit "fake" somehow? No, the money was put aside or spent with the expectation that the sale would happen down the line. Overall, at the end of the console's lifetime, you add it all up and see whether there was true profit on the unit or not. You don't just call it fake or try to count that loss or profit twice.

That doesn't even make any sense, RocketPig, and you know it. On the face of it, one could point out that the unit they get the money for on April first will go towards units they produce and ship in June, but do not get the money for until July. The point is, they have 3 months worth of produced, shipped and sold consoles, and they're counting three months of sold consoles.

But what they're doing with the repair-cost chargeback is saying, "We have these ongoing costs that we shouldn't have, so we want to show our investors that without those unforseen costs, we'd be making tiny profits."

The costs were foreseen, though.  MS knew they were shipping out bad hardware.  They just didn't care enough to delay it and fix it.