For once I agree. It's almost as if 60% of the articles here have to have an "us versus them" slant. And "them" automatically means evil/bad/inferior/crap.
I love my Apple gear, but that doesn't mean that I have to take every opportunity to **** on everyone else.
Agreed, I don't want a company as big as Microsoft to fail, I want them to innovate too. The more companies we have innovating & pushing features in the market the better for the advance of technology. It's why monopolies were outlawed years ago because having one dominant organization leads to corruption & laziness.
People seem to think Apple is the company that can do no wrong but a company is amoral. Competition keeps people honest and Apple can only be great if it has a cause. Take away their competition & they have no cause except to just make more money. It's all down hill from there.
Actually, it's all about the money. If you don't make a profit, then, you're right, the money doesn't matter, because you're out of business.
But MS and Apple are strong rival in most every area. That's why seeing where they're going financially is important. It let's us know how successful they are against countering each other's moves.
As far as Exxon goes, you're right. But even there, it's psychological. And psychology matters to investors. I'm one of them.
Well... maybe. Of course it's all about money, but I don't think many serious investors are sitting on the edges of their seats waiting for Apple to pass Microsoft in earnings before they decide to buy the stock. On a whole, rankings are useless as measures of anything. They're more like parlor games than serious measures of performance.
Yikes. For those who haven't clicked, it's a chart illustrating Microsoft's four-quarter loss of $2.5b in online services. They've apparently mastered the difficult art of losing money online.
Please allow those of us who have suffered the taunts, the denigration, the laughter, the sarcasm of idiots like Michael Dell for over twenty years to gloat a little will you. Almost since the beginning Apple enthusiasts have listened to pundits tell us how irrelevant Apple is, what an insignificant niche player it is, what idiots we who buy Apple products are. We were second class web citizens who were regularly told to go away by web sites that worked only with Windows. We listened to John Dvorak castigate Apple for daring to enter the cellphone market. We listened to monkey boy Steve Ballmer babble on about rounding errors. Well, the smirks on the faces of the likes of Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer have been wiped off their ugly mugs. APPL is worth more than MSFT. AAPL took in more revenue than MSFT. AAPL has more cash on hand than DELL is even worth. All that's left is for AAPL to exceed MSFT in profits. I'm betting that Tim Cook wouldn't even take a phone call from Michael Dell these days.
+1
The rest of the industry can dish it but can't take it. It's fun to watch
Geez. Microsoft waits for Apple's numbers and then adjusts theirs to slightly beat them. Apple should just change date that they announce earnings to follow MSFT.
Interesting to see that Microsoft now has three pillars to its business - Windows, Office and Xbox. It looks like Microsoft's investment into a new area paid off for once.
Interesting to see that Microsoft now has three pillars to its business - Windows, Office and Xbox. It looks like Microsoft's investment into a new area paid off for once.
more like sony screwed up. original x-box was good and the 360 is nice, but it took sony screwing up the PS3 to make the xbox 360 successful
the original PS3 was
- way too expensive at $500
- i've read that development was a big PITA because Sony thought that they ruled the marketplace
- it was noisy and generated a lot of heat
- the blu-ray and other OS capability was a big profit no-no since you could buy it and never buy a game. i have the slim and don't have any games. i use it for netflix and blu-ray and soon probably hulu streaming. it's a killer blu ray player since it will be supported for years to come. unlike the regular consumer models
- the development issues meant that most games didn't take advantage of the hardware. and the multi-core CPU was too far ahead of it's time
Interesting to see that Microsoft now has three pillars to its business - Windows, Office and Xbox. It looks like Microsoft's investment into a new area paid off for once.
...though it will be several years before they recoup their investment and losses for XBox. in contrast, iPad probably already paid for itself in its first quarter. It was profitable coming out of the gate.
Of course, Windows and Office are profitable. They are so profitable they prop up everything else MS does, much of which has such a poor performance and profitability that you can read about some creative accounting using some kind of general slush fund that covers it all up.
To everyone else:
One reason Apple supporters are excited about the closing gap in quarterly profits is that the profits on the Windows and Office cash cows are considered to be due to the unethical monopolistic hold MS has had on the PC (not to mention taking cues from Apple). And it really is no wonder they can hold on to higher profits for one more quarter: MS' software business really is like "printing money". How much does it really cost to copy a DVD and slap it in a cardboard box and sell it for hundreds? Or, how much does it really cost to generate a list of serial numbers for OEM's? Nothing. It's inaccurate to say Apple is printing money; Apple works hard to make quality products that people love to use.
And whoever said "companies are amoral" is being a little disingenuous. Companies are made up of people and leadership which displays a certain character and qualities, or not. We know the characters and qualities of Apple leadership; we know they are passionate and want to make insanely great products they love to use themselves. This is in extremely sharp contrast to the dubious and unethical practices perpetrated by MS over the years and which were led by it's weaselling and indifferent leadership from day one, beginning with the DOS deal with IBM; we know they would rather rename and remarket something than improve it; we know they love to obfuscate and figure out the least intuitive way to do something... We know a lot of things about them that we don't like or admire. You should look Guy Kawasaki up on YouTube, where he speaks about the kind of start-ups that should be funded (ie. those that want to make a difference, and not those that want to make money -- because the latter screw themselves up eventually, as we are witnessing). (There is also a funny clip of Guy interviewing Ballmer).
Furthermore, the indifference and ineptitude of MS is considered to have cost the business world, school systems, non-profits, governments and average computer users billions in lost time and productivity, in lax security and virus attacks, and to have held back computing in general for who knows how many years. When we say we don't like MS, we mean we don't like the company, we don't like their products, but most of all, we don't like their leadership and how they act and what they stand for. There is nothing amoral about it. It's completely immoral, scandalous and outrageous when you think about it.
So, it will be a nice day when they do get their comeuppance.
I don't know about better, but OpenOffice is competitive. 95% of the commonly used features and 99% compatibility for free (I don't know the percentages, but they're pretty high).
The problem is not that OpenOffice is uncompetitive, but that most people buy Microsoft Office by default- businesses in particular.
The problem is that at least on the Mac, OpenOffice sucks goat balls big time. Using it is the biggest PITA I've ever met.
That statement is unfounded. Microsoft had recouped its R&D costs on the Xbox 360 by 2008.
No-one said anything about R&D particularly. There is also using it as a loss-leader for years in order to gain Market share and sell more profitable games. There is covering the failed devices that have been returned in large numbers. There is selling off warehouses of unsold stock at a discount when they stuff the channels. It all adds up.
I'll try and look up some of the articles that speak of these details. Just because the XBox division has a positive or profitable figure in its column for a given quarter, even the last two years, does not mean that it has made an overall positive contribution to MS in its whole history. There are a lot of sunk costs. I remember loads of articles over the last few years saying that due to the billions sunk in and lost by XBox, it will be years before it makes a positive contribution to MS' bottom line, no matter how well it sells. I don't see the bits and pieces that they creatively scoop over into the XBox column as really making a dent in all that yet. But I am very happy to be convinced otherwise. Trouble is, you have to take MS and pro-MS sites with a grain of salt -- goes back to that thing about character that I mentioned .
The point is, mentioning XBox as a pillar of the company in the same sentence as Office and Windows seems a bit optimistic. The reason that MS can make a go of it and try to gain influence in other areas and markets is because of the creative "slush funds" enabled by Windows and Office. But, who knows, it may end up being a sound strategy: the former enterprise powerhouse formerly known as Microsoft, and which used to compete with that funny little company called Apple which made these "toy" computers, is now a powerhouse in the games industry; who'd a thunk it?
Whereas, Apple really does have four pillars: Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Of course Apple is making less profit: 70% of the price of each of these is for quality components, engineering, manufacturing, assembly. When a XBox is sold at discount or at a two-for-one, I would bet that 50% of that price is more than enough to cover the cost of the XBox. It should be highly profitable for MS. But they do tend to bungle things, don't they? I think the only thing they don't bungle is their accounting.
The channel tunnel is currently operating "in the black", looking at one statement at a time -- this doesn't mean it hasn't been refinanced umpteen times, resold to new consortiums, off-loaded nor generally lost the stigma of going astronomically over-budget, costing the tax payer and generally being regarded as a bit of a black hole as a financial undertaking... But, no doubt, it's a great experience, it's useful and it makes travel between Britain and France extremely convenient, at least for train travel. When driving, however, as I do, I still take the ferry.
You own a "for profit" business, the bottom line is to make money. Anyone that thinks otherwise, doesn't live in this world. Non for profit business is another story and should just be labeled 'charity'.
However, I knew that Microsoft's grasp on the world market was coming to an end when I saw the first Mac's enter into the US military's inventory. There is a def shift in the PC paradigm today.
When you have a publicly traded business its not just about making money. It is about showing that you can sustain profitability and that your business plan is one worth investing in and thus will allow for a return on investment by increasing stock price. Sometimes it is acceptable to actually lose money for short periods of time if it shows that you are gaining market share. Sure profits help shareholders too in the form of dividends but only if the company pays them which Apple does not.
All that aside, I'm happy for Microsoft. I really hope they get back to focussing on their core business and use the time out of the spotlight to really streamline their product lines and reevaluate where they see themselves in the mobile market that kind of caught them by surprise despite their decade plus head start in it.
When you have a publicly traded business its not just about making money. It is about showing that you can sustain profitability and that your business plan is one worth investing in and thus will allow for a return on investment by increasing stock price. Sometimes it is acceptable to actually lose money for short periods of time if it shows that you are gaining market share. Sure profits help shareholders too in the form of dividends but only if the company pays them which Apple does not.
Everything past your first sentence is proving Mac.World's point about being "for-profit". Font confuse short term goals with long term goals that require significant investments, it's still all about maximizing their profits.
Comments
For once I agree. It's almost as if 60% of the articles here have to have an "us versus them" slant. And "them" automatically means evil/bad/inferior/crap.
I love my Apple gear, but that doesn't mean that I have to take every opportunity to **** on everyone else.
Agreed, I don't want a company as big as Microsoft to fail, I want them to innovate too. The more companies we have innovating & pushing features in the market the better for the advance of technology. It's why monopolies were outlawed years ago because having one dominant organization leads to corruption & laziness.
People seem to think Apple is the company that can do no wrong but a company is amoral. Competition keeps people honest and Apple can only be great if it has a cause. Take away their competition & they have no cause except to just make more money. It's all down hill from there.
Actually, it's all about the money. If you don't make a profit, then, you're right, the money doesn't matter, because you're out of business.
But MS and Apple are strong rival in most every area. That's why seeing where they're going financially is important. It let's us know how successful they are against countering each other's moves.
As far as Exxon goes, you're right. But even there, it's psychological. And psychology matters to investors. I'm one of them.
Well... maybe. Of course it's all about money, but I don't think many serious investors are sitting on the edges of their seats waiting for Apple to pass Microsoft in earnings before they decide to buy the stock. On a whole, rankings are useless as measures of anything. They're more like parlor games than serious measures of performance.
Something interesting in MS's financials:
http://e.businessinsider.com/view/z3t.31u/e2b9425f
Yikes. For those who haven't clicked, it's a chart illustrating Microsoft's four-quarter loss of $2.5b in online services. They've apparently mastered the difficult art of losing money online.
According to Microsoft, 8 million Kinect sensors were sold in just 60 days.
With Microsoft in particular I wish reports of "sales" from them would clarify if it's "sales" to the channel or actual retail sales to end users.
MS is infamous for quoting "sales" when all they did was stuff the channel
Please allow those of us who have suffered the taunts, the denigration, the laughter, the sarcasm of idiots like Michael Dell for over twenty years to gloat a little will you. Almost since the beginning Apple enthusiasts have listened to pundits tell us how irrelevant Apple is, what an insignificant niche player it is, what idiots we who buy Apple products are. We were second class web citizens who were regularly told to go away by web sites that worked only with Windows. We listened to John Dvorak castigate Apple for daring to enter the cellphone market. We listened to monkey boy Steve Ballmer babble on about rounding errors. Well, the smirks on the faces of the likes of Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer have been wiped off their ugly mugs. APPL is worth more than MSFT. AAPL took in more revenue than MSFT. AAPL has more cash on hand than DELL is even worth. All that's left is for AAPL to exceed MSFT in profits. I'm betting that Tim Cook wouldn't even take a phone call from Michael Dell these days.
+1
The rest of the industry can dish it but can't take it. It's fun to watch
Geez. Microsoft waits for Apple's numbers and then adjusts theirs to slightly beat them.
Oh, yeah. THAT'S what happened.
With Microsoft in particular I wish reports of "sales" from them would clarify if it's "sales" to the channel or actual retail sales to end users.
MS is infamous for quoting "sales" when all they did was stuff the channel
it was 5 million real sales and 8 million channel sales. i bought an x-box kinect bundle on black friday and only a few select retailers had them.
Interesting to see that Microsoft now has three pillars to its business - Windows, Office and Xbox. It looks like Microsoft's investment into a new area paid off for once.
more like sony screwed up. original x-box was good and the 360 is nice, but it took sony screwing up the PS3 to make the xbox 360 successful
the original PS3 was
- way too expensive at $500
- i've read that development was a big PITA because Sony thought that they ruled the marketplace
- it was noisy and generated a lot of heat
- the blu-ray and other OS capability was a big profit no-no since you could buy it and never buy a game. i have the slim and don't have any games. i use it for netflix and blu-ray and soon probably hulu streaming. it's a killer blu ray player since it will be supported for years to come. unlike the regular consumer models
- the development issues meant that most games didn't take advantage of the hardware. and the multi-core CPU was too far ahead of it's time
- it's so easy to play pirated content on it
Interesting to see that Microsoft now has three pillars to its business - Windows, Office and Xbox. It looks like Microsoft's investment into a new area paid off for once.
...though it will be several years before they recoup their investment and losses for XBox. in contrast, iPad probably already paid for itself in its first quarter. It was profitable coming out of the gate.
Of course, Windows and Office are profitable. They are so profitable they prop up everything else MS does, much of which has such a poor performance and profitability that you can read about some creative accounting using some kind of general slush fund that covers it all up.
To everyone else:
One reason Apple supporters are excited about the closing gap in quarterly profits is that the profits on the Windows and Office cash cows are considered to be due to the unethical monopolistic hold MS has had on the PC (not to mention taking cues from Apple). And it really is no wonder they can hold on to higher profits for one more quarter: MS' software business really is like "printing money". How much does it really cost to copy a DVD and slap it in a cardboard box and sell it for hundreds? Or, how much does it really cost to generate a list of serial numbers for OEM's? Nothing. It's inaccurate to say Apple is printing money; Apple works hard to make quality products that people love to use.
And whoever said "companies are amoral" is being a little disingenuous. Companies are made up of people and leadership which displays a certain character and qualities, or not. We know the characters and qualities of Apple leadership; we know they are passionate and want to make insanely great products they love to use themselves. This is in extremely sharp contrast to the dubious and unethical practices perpetrated by MS over the years and which were led by it's weaselling and indifferent leadership from day one, beginning with the DOS deal with IBM; we know they would rather rename and remarket something than improve it; we know they love to obfuscate and figure out the least intuitive way to do something... We know a lot of things about them that we don't like or admire. You should look Guy Kawasaki up on YouTube, where he speaks about the kind of start-ups that should be funded (ie. those that want to make a difference, and not those that want to make money -- because the latter screw themselves up eventually, as we are witnessing). (There is also a funny clip of Guy interviewing Ballmer).
Furthermore, the indifference and ineptitude of MS is considered to have cost the business world, school systems, non-profits, governments and average computer users billions in lost time and productivity, in lax security and virus attacks, and to have held back computing in general for who knows how many years. When we say we don't like MS, we mean we don't like the company, we don't like their products, but most of all, we don't like their leadership and how they act and what they stand for. There is nothing amoral about it. It's completely immoral, scandalous and outrageous when you think about it.
So, it will be a nice day when they do get their comeuppance.
...though it will be several years before they recoup their investment and losses for XBox.
That statement is unfounded. Microsoft had recouped its R&D costs on the Xbox 360 by 2008.
I don't know about better, but OpenOffice is competitive. 95% of the commonly used features and 99% compatibility for free (I don't know the percentages, but they're pretty high).
The problem is not that OpenOffice is uncompetitive, but that most people buy Microsoft Office by default- businesses in particular.
The problem is that at least on the Mac, OpenOffice sucks goat balls big time. Using it is the biggest PITA I've ever met.
That statement is unfounded. Microsoft had recouped its R&D costs on the Xbox 360 by 2008.
No-one said anything about R&D particularly. There is also using it as a loss-leader for years in order to gain Market share and sell more profitable games. There is covering the failed devices that have been returned in large numbers. There is selling off warehouses of unsold stock at a discount when they stuff the channels. It all adds up.
I'll try and look up some of the articles that speak of these details. Just because the XBox division has a positive or profitable figure in its column for a given quarter, even the last two years, does not mean that it has made an overall positive contribution to MS in its whole history. There are a lot of sunk costs. I remember loads of articles over the last few years saying that due to the billions sunk in and lost by XBox, it will be years before it makes a positive contribution to MS' bottom line, no matter how well it sells. I don't see the bits and pieces that they creatively scoop over into the XBox column as really making a dent in all that yet. But I am very happy to be convinced otherwise. Trouble is, you have to take MS and pro-MS sites with a grain of salt -- goes back to that thing about character that I mentioned
The point is, mentioning XBox as a pillar of the company in the same sentence as Office and Windows seems a bit optimistic. The reason that MS can make a go of it and try to gain influence in other areas and markets is because of the creative "slush funds" enabled by Windows and Office. But, who knows, it may end up being a sound strategy: the former enterprise powerhouse formerly known as Microsoft, and which used to compete with that funny little company called Apple which made these "toy" computers, is now a powerhouse in the games industry; who'd a thunk it?
Whereas, Apple really does have four pillars: Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Of course Apple is making less profit: 70% of the price of each of these is for quality components, engineering, manufacturing, assembly. When a XBox is sold at discount or at a two-for-one, I would bet that 50% of that price is more than enough to cover the cost of the XBox. It should be highly profitable for MS. But they do tend to bungle things, don't they? I think the only thing they don't bungle is their accounting.
The channel tunnel is currently operating "in the black", looking at one statement at a time -- this doesn't mean it hasn't been refinanced umpteen times, resold to new consortiums, off-loaded nor generally lost the stigma of going astronomically over-budget, costing the tax payer and generally being regarded as a bit of a black hole as a financial undertaking... But, no doubt, it's a great experience, it's useful and it makes travel between Britain and France extremely convenient, at least for train travel. When driving, however, as I do, I still take the ferry.
You own a "for profit" business, the bottom line is to make money. Anyone that thinks otherwise, doesn't live in this world. Non for profit business is another story and should just be labeled 'charity'.
However, I knew that Microsoft's grasp on the world market was coming to an end when I saw the first Mac's enter into the US military's inventory. There is a def shift in the PC paradigm today.
When you have a publicly traded business its not just about making money. It is about showing that you can sustain profitability and that your business plan is one worth investing in and thus will allow for a return on investment by increasing stock price. Sometimes it is acceptable to actually lose money for short periods of time if it shows that you are gaining market share. Sure profits help shareholders too in the form of dividends but only if the company pays them which Apple does not.
All that aside, I'm happy for Microsoft. I really hope they get back to focussing on their core business and use the time out of the spotlight to really streamline their product lines and reevaluate where they see themselves in the mobile market that kind of caught them by surprise despite their decade plus head start in it.
When you have a publicly traded business its not just about making money. It is about showing that you can sustain profitability and that your business plan is one worth investing in and thus will allow for a return on investment by increasing stock price. Sometimes it is acceptable to actually lose money for short periods of time if it shows that you are gaining market share. Sure profits help shareholders too in the form of dividends but only if the company pays them which Apple does not.
Everything past your first sentence is proving Mac.World's point about being "for-profit". Font confuse short term goals with long term goals that require significant investments, it's still all about maximizing their profits.