Quote:
Originally Posted by wizwor
OK, then xbox. The point is MS chose to enter a market dominated by established players and very quickly became one of the dominent, established players.
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MS spent about $7
billion on the XBox so far. As of last April, they were still down about $5 billion. They're years away from truly breaking even on the project.
As to "established," big players can get blown out of the gamer market -- as Atari and Sega demonstrate.
MS has also failed spectacularly in many markets; email, web portals, music, tablet PC's, web identity (Passport), mobile (Kin, WinCE), ebooks (.lit format)....
MS entering a market hardly guarantees it will succeed. B&N receiving $300 million is a big help, except that a) they're going to flush a nice chunk of that down the tubes switching to Win 8, and b) they burned through $80 million last year -- and the trends are all down.
So B&N is better off with MS's money, but it hardly guarantees success.