^ Replace *spent* with 'earned before costs'.  

When they include things like marketing expenses on other divisions products (windows and office) and release failed devices like the Microsoft Kin phones, it's always going to be hard to make the EDD look that cost effective.  

So Microsoft will keep there gaming division then.

Seriously would anyone listen to Oldman Sacks now after the financial crisis?

If your business model fails so royally that you find yourself needing $10,000,000,000.00 worth of tax payers money in order to stay afloat while in turn making those same tax payers lose their homes due to changes of policy on the fly.

Hell the fact they needed $10,000,000,000.00 from taxes is enough to show just how great their business runs. Last I checked businesses were supposed to run on a profit.

GS gets credit for making some crazy stunts a reality. Like messing around with the legality and ethics distributing food by regulating and monetizing it's worth enough to inadvertantly cause the death of around 80 million people in 2009.

I somehow side with you in the sense that M$ spends a lot and gets amall marging of profit from the division. Meanwhile, the xbox division constitutes a small fraction of the company's value.

We are gamers and GS are the Analyst to advise M$.  If the division is made to stand alone,  costs would be minimised whilse greater margin of profits would be achieved.

Maybe bang for your buck wasn't the best choice of words on my part.  My main point was that costs are high and the margins are low in the Entertainment division compared to the other divisions and that Goldman Sachs think that they should do something about it.  Here are some actual statements and suggestions from Goldman Sachs:

"keep the company more diligent from a spending perspective."

"divesting more peripheral assets such as gaming."

"more discipline on cost could turn the businesses into contributors to profitability and shareholder value"

"show unlocked value with forced cost discipline compared to as a piece of Microsoft"

It seems like they are mainly saying that they need to control costs in the Entertainment division and one way they could be forced to do so is to make it a separate entity.  I don't know what other solutions GS are suggesting, maybe others can clarify.

As for what the normal industry standard profit margin of a successful company's hardware division is, that would be unknown to me without some actual numbers. It would be good if we had some stats from some companies to compare.  We also should include more than just Sony since we would like to measure by success (maybe a top 15 company list).  It would also be good if we compared separate hardware companies since that is what GS is suggesting Entertainment and Devices Division become.

Because of iPods and iPhones, not because of Macs

GS' recommendation is clearly driven by their pump & dump mentality; it would be sweet for investors if MS sold of the Xbox, a big payoff for pump and dumpers.

What's your point, Apple is a direct competitor to MS in OS, music players and phones. Apple has enough leverage in the ipod market to affect the desktop market, as their no flash policy shows. To dismiss Apple because MS has marketshare is as shortsighted as Goldman-Sachs' retarded recommendation.

This has been hashed twice now, the origional post you were replying to had the premise that Windows (not MS) was far greater than Apple, as I said before, not the best wording, but the intent is clear, that poster was referring to the Mac division of Apple, your point was, and still is, moot.