bleab

red oak said:

Evidently, completely ***ing up mobile including the failed Nokia merger and Windows mobile,  the failed MIcrosoft retail stores,  weak Microsoft Surface device sales, failed wearables efforts, failed content services including MS App Store and music, …

Evidently, it all does not matter  how badly you **** up

Until the rise of the iPhone and iPad, Microsoft was the world's #1 company thanks to Windows, Office and enterprise software. While mobile took some of that business away, it didn't take away nearly as much as the people who primarily use Apple devices - and as a result have no idea just how vital those are to the vast majority of businesses and a vital segment of high income consumers - predicted. Instead mobile replaced "dumb" consumer electronics devices that Microsoft never made in the first place: Radio Shack stuff. Or mobile became the first true "personal computer" that people used voluntarily apart from work or school or - in the case of Android in developing nations - used at all.  The result is that while Microsoft missed out on the new market unlike GE, RCA, Sony etc. they didn't lose very much of what they already had to mobile. 

Also need to address some misconceptions and outright falsehoods. First Microsoft makes plenty of money on content: video game sales on XBox and Windows as well as the 50-75 million XBox Game Pass and XBox Gold subscriptions. Also, Microsoft makes plenty of money on mobile by way of their Office 365 apps. Thanks to the 70% cut from those as opposed to a 30% and not having the platform maintenance expenses, lots of people speculated that Microsoft was making more profit off mobile than Google was. Finally while Microsoft gets negligible direct revenue from XBox and Windows hardware they make tons off accessories because of high margins. Microsoft didn't provide full financials on this to the Epic trial because the numbers would have shown that - for example - while they lose money on $300-$500 XBox consoles that lasts 7 years, they make plenty on the $70 controllers that need to be replaced every 18 months, require 2-4 per console and are heavily used for PC gaming too. 

Finally you are ignoring what has been the main driver of Microsoft revenue growth the last 5 years: cloud. While Ballmer was the Microsoft CEO, everyone assumed that Amazon and Google were going to run away with cloud. But Microsoft ditched Ballmer for Nadella who put in a plan.
1.  Admit that Google GSuite was a real threat and get serious about Office 365 to crush it
2. Create a SaaS or PaaS equivalent for every Microsoft enterprise product i.e. Sharepoint, Active Directory, SQL Server etc.
3. Focused on establishing at least basic feature parity for Amazon AWS product.
4. Get their massive enterprise customer base to partially or completely replace their existing products with cloud ones. They are even promoting Azure as the solution for getting rid of their 32 bit legacy code (turning it into software as a service which allows you to use modern hardware and software platforms going forward). So now even though AWS is way ahead Azure is a respectable #2 with Google Cloud Platform only (barely) profitable because it is able to hitch a ride on the same infrastructure they use for YouTube, search and Android.

While a lot of people are laughing at things like xCloud and especially Stadia now as well as calling 5G nothing but hype, it actually is the way of the future. It is going to make platforms agnostic and hardware a commodity for most people. Even graphic design, animation and VFX is being done in the cloud now. Currently the economics are a barrier - a small time operation is much better off spending $50,000 upfront for 10 M1 Mac Minis plus software than getting the equivalent for $3000 a month via cloud - but a larger organization would benefit from being able to provide the same software over the cloud to people who can access it with cheap ChromeOS or Windows 2-in-1s to access it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from anywhere in the world. Pixar proved that it was possible by doing the last 12+ months of work - voice acting, scoring, sound mixing, postproduction etc. - on Luca from the cloud. Granted it was done with iPads - this is Pixar we are talking about here - and not Dell or HP Surface clones running Windows or ChromeOS, but Apple would rather that work be done with $3000 Macs than $1000 iPad Pros.

That is why Microsoft has $2 trillion in valuation - and Google $1.5 trillion - despite neither selling anywhere near 250 million mobile devices or even 25 million PCs a year. Apple probably gets more new revenue from Apple Arcade than Microsoft from xCloud and especially Google from Stadia today, but everyone believes that the delivery model for xCloud and Stadia - SaaS over 5G (with 6G on the way https://newatlas.com/telecommunications/samsung-6g-prototype-terahertz/) and broadband is the business model of tomorrow.