roughlydrafted.com — The big corporations partering with Microsoft suggest that the company knows what it's doing, but real the secret is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business. Here's why DRM is the least of the Zune's worries! Daniel Eran, RoughlyDrafted Magazine : The Truth, Censored by Digg.
Oct 10, 2006 View in Crawl 4
dieseltravisOct 11, 2006
@LaughingMatt: the fact that they lose money on the Xbox hardware doesn't really matter when they make so much money on the games. Sony and MS compete in the gaming market using the Gillette model. The practically give away the razor and make a killing on the blades. You can't believe that they are losing money with subscription-based services like Xbox live either.
danielnielsenOct 11, 2006
Thanks dude, that was a nice atricle.
web_weaselOct 11, 2006
I've been in IT for over 20 years and I've seen this before. Last time it was IBM and the mainframe. The arguments were mostly the same (monopoly, overpriced, low quality, unfair competition). IBM didn't go anywhere but they did make fundamental changes to adapt to the new market. MS is in the same boat. They need to make fundamental changes to stay competitive in the modern market. Gates (and probably Balmer) stepping down is a good first step. If they can change their corporate culture and vision before the shareholders revolt they have a bright future.
rasterbatorOct 11, 2006
Marked as inaccurate. If they were secret, they wouldn't have shown up on digg.com
windows95Oct 12, 2006
It's so hilarious how the instant somebody does an honest and factual analysis of Microsoft, the Righteous Disciples of BIll come out with a vengeance, gibbering and foaming at the mouth, accompanied by their usual mantra of "OMG Anti-Microsoft bias!!!".Real sorry the truth about Microsoft isn't rosey, kids.But that's not the journalist's fault.
laserdiscOct 12, 2006
Should add Apple to that list too. Cause let's face it Apple has some very sleek form factors for their desktops.
Closed AccountOct 12, 2006
dieseltravis: the Xbox 1 only made profits for microsoft on 2 or 3 quarters, meaning the sales of games and accessories wasn't enough to recoup the more than 4 billion they lost with the project, so the Xbox 1 is still on the red by 4 billion, while the PS2 if it ever were a loss leader, made enourmous profits to sony.the razor/blade model used by gillete doesn't always work the same way on other markets
blackmicroOct 13, 2006
Typical... I didn't expect much more from Dell. Thanks for the link to the shopping cart - that's a great promo!
catchblue22Nov 19, 2006
This blogger is basically correct I believe. MS is a corrupt and bloated monopoly that needs to be crushed. They only innovate when the market forces them to (Firefox caused them to finally upgrade IE, and OSX has inspired many of the features on Vista). Their development costs are unreasonably high due to bloat and unnecessary complexity (5 years between major releases of windows!!!!!) MS is like GM in the late 70's to mid 80's, producing crap, while trying to compete to the Japanese auto makers. We can all see GM's current stock price. Is MS far behind?