I realize I commented on this once before, but the sheer magnitude of the number below almost knocked me out of my chair! Microsoft made almost 5 billion dollars in the first three months of the year.
The world’s largest software maker said net profit in the three months to 31 March was $4.93bn (£2.47bn) or 50 cents per share, up from $2.98bn last year.
That’s profit, folks, not revenue. I checked Wikipedia for the accounting definition of “profit” because I was fairly certain I had a basic misunderstanding of the word. It turns out there are various forms of profit and this figure (Gross profit, maybe?) likely represents something other than what they deposited at the bank, which would be “Net Profit after Tax”…..I think.
I tried to find a more definitive statement of what they took to the bank last quarter. I ran across this and this. I’m more confused than ever!
How much did they make?! An assload of money, that’s how much!
Those bastards have the audacity to put out a sub-standard product and rake in tens of billions of dollars a year??
Some of you are going to think: “If they’re making that much money, they must have the best product. They deserve it.” Well, I challenge you to buy a PC without some form of MS Windows installed. Believe me, I’ve tried. (Sidenote: Some have succeeded in getting a credit for the OS since they installed Linux instead, as stipulated in the MS license, but not me.) This is known to geeks as the MS tax.
And before you think to yourselves about how highly you regard the technical marvel of an operating system MS is making so much money off of, remember the last time your machine succumbed to a virus, a trojan, some piece of malware. Think back to the last time your machine slowed to a crawl and you weren’t able to figure out why. Think about the wasted time, whether it was yours or that of the family geek who came to your house to “clean it up”. How many times has that happened?
It doesn’t have to be that way. (Hint: it’s free.)
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