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Originally Posted by Nathanael
Microsoft couldn't survive on what it makes from any of them.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
That's not really the point.
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It's
my point, and it's the only point I've been trying to make: Microsoft is far too dependent on its Windows/Office revenue stream, which is already in decline.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
A company like MS can't afford to have all its eggs in one basket; it relies on revenue from a wide range of different products for its total income.
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Not really. Looking at the numbers I provided in my previous post, of the nearly $35 billion in operating income Microsoft had in FY12 roughly $31 billion came from two sources: Windows and Office.
Everything else Microsoft does put together accounted for only about $4 billion, and of that, perhaps $3.5 billion (the Tools side of Server and Tools) came from products so closely tied to Windows they couldn't survive on their own.
Put another way, Microsoft could comfortably survive the loss of every other product it sells. If the words "relies on" mean anything, then Microsoft's cake comes in only two flavors; everything else is just icing.
Microsoft has spent most of the past two decades attempting to find a successful mobile strategy. So far all it has to show is a string of failures. And then a strange thing happened: while Ballmer was publicly laughing off the iPhone, and MS was still dorking around with WinCE, Apple was busy reconfiguring the tech world around its mobile offerings. Microsoft's failure to read the tea leaves handed Google the opportunity it needed to break into mobile, and Microsoft was once again left flat-footed.
Of course, that may actually be a good thing for Microsoft. By some estimates, Microsoft makes more money from Android than it does from its own mobile OS.
Maybe Windows 8 and Surface will finally change all that; I'm just not betting the farm on it.