Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Where is this MS resurgence? Unless you only count Azure and Rental SW, it's moribund.
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In twenty different billion dollar-plus businesses.
A few examples:
In cloud computing, they are neck and neck with Amazon (they just beat them for a US$10B government contract) and both are lapping the field. By now they are close to faking in US$40B a year and were growing at a 70%+ last year.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/mi...wth-continues/
In hardware, the Surface Line is moving several billion a year, growing at 21%, and rolling out innovative products nobody else is producing like Surface Studio for artists, Surface Hub conference room computer displays, and HoloLens mixed reality systems. All unique and all selling into the very profitable corporate market. Not kid stuff.
The same applies to Office 365, newly expanded and renamed as Microsoft 365, as it expands its already large consumer sales. They have 38M subscriptions at US$100 or so each year. And growing. That's another $40B a year.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...el/2918896001/
XBOX?
Yeah, they lost money on the first XBOX, mostly because people hacked it and used it as a media center PC instead of for gaming. But even after the Red Ring of Death fiasco, they made billions annually off 360 games, the newer hardware, and (sound familiar?) subscriptions. XBOX LIVE has around 50m subscribers, each paying US$50-60 a year. That's about $3B a year.
And they just added the GAME PASS subscription service that just reached 10M subscribers at US$10 a month. That's another US$1.2B a year all by itself and it's still growing. And that is witbout including their cut of game and video sales tbrough their digital store at a time when game sales across all platforms are moving to digital:
https://business.financialpost.com/t...by-2021-report
And MS makes good money off video sales and rentals, too. Music? Still working that. Just enough to stay in business. They need a free tier and better marketing there.
The dirty secret of gaming is that while PS4 sold more consoles, MS made and makes much more money off gaming than Sony both on console and PC. In fact, Sony is starting to sell a handful of tbeir exclusives for PC. There's too much money there to ignore.
It's much the same all over.
MS makes tons of money of Macs, Android, and even iOS. They have hundreds of top android apps. They're simply all over. Where most of tbe big tech companies (Google, Facebook, etc) are one trick ponies making the bulk of tbeir money off one business, MS is fully diversified.
This is from 2016 but things haven't changed much:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google...ney-come-from/
Windows? Less than 10%
(It's not that Windows has declined at all; It's that everything else has exploded. $12B is hardly a decline.)
Gaming? Over 15%.
Office? The same.
Azure? 20%.
And all are growing.
MS became the most valuable company on Earth in nov 2018 and has been jockeying with Amazon and (occasionally) Apple for top dog for most of the time since. 2020 is seeing them and Amazon inch ahead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...capitalization
So no, the days of the monkey boy are long gone and MS is quietly dominant again. US$120B a year in revenue and US$90B in cash reserves from non-US income. And looking to move further ahead. Is that your idea of "moribund"? A lot of companies would love to be that moribund, methinks.
And the future?
Microsoft 365 is just starting a big push into the consumer space, Azure is signing up customers with a vengeance, keeping pace with Amazon. (Amazon has more customers, MS has a deeper app system and hence make more per customer. It's a good race.) And Teams was growing big time before the crisis and exploded 40% in the first week of lockdowns.
And for gaming?
Ahh, yes, XBOX 2020..
Xbox Series X is already in production in Malaysia and China by most reports and today are announcing their slate of upcoming third party titles. Next month they'll announce the first party slate (they've recently bought like a dozen studios including OBSIDIAN, and are rumored to be sitting on news of more, possibly one of tbe bigger ones.) They're doing another anouncement in July, probable for the cheaper Lockhart/ "series s" model, maybe for pre-orders. Plus they're launching with HALO: INFINITE starting a new arc and a rumored free to play online component. (Everybody wants a piece of tbat action.)
Oh, and their game streaming service XCLOUD is in beta. Sony will be using some of tgeir tech. So far Google Stadia is a dud (expensive, good graphics, horrible lag). NVIDIA runs well but software debelooers aren't playing ball with their business model. How that plays out is TBD but so far MS is doing well.
And Sony? They still haven't shown their console and their announced tech is 25-30% slower and it might even cost more than the high end XBOX. All there are are rumors and not good ones; that they are expensive to build, that the storage module overheats, that they haven't shown it because they're redesigning the cooling, that they might miss tbe 2020 release window. Overclocking the CPU, GPU, and storage has a price, apparently.
Round 4 of XBOX vs Playstation is shaping up like a dog fight; Sony brand loyalty vs XBOX design and pricing. Especially if the all-digital Series S realty comes in at $299.
All that might not fit your idea of "resurgence" but when when the moneyguys start dinging Apple for not being as innovative as MS it's clear Nadella is doing a *lot* of things right. Haters or no haters.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/th...ple-2019-09-12
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...luable-company
And despite all those, Word *still* doesn't output epub or Kindle without add-ons.
(The Kindle add-on is real good, though.)