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.
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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Get off you M$ soapbox. Everyone know that M$ is targeted by every bad guy on the planet. The good thing about that is they discover and help M$ become more secure by publishing the bugs. Before M$ it was Unix. Remember the GNU-EMACS flaw in the 80′s? It gave hacker root privs… Listen to Bruce Potter’s theories on M$. He agrees that at least they fix the flaws in timley fashion, instead or relying on others or yourlself to plug holes.
P.S. I purchased a new PC with Vist. My comments: its pretty not functional as Mac. Its where Mac was 4-5 years ago. Don’t mean to insult by this post…
-sr
No sweat, I can certainly appreciate your counterpoint.
I’m not sure that I totally agree with MS simply being the lowest hanging fruit. The numbers are there, granted, but I’m of the opinion that MS is targeted more for their shaky foundation than anything else. Vista has finally seen the implementation of some sort of privilege separation, which they’re calling User Account Control (UAC). It’s 2007! What took so long?! Every single system I, as the family geek, have been asked to “fix”, has been due entirely to the absence of privilege separation. Why should my mom be running as the administrator? There’s really no need.
In order to keep malware at bay, I tried to put this idea into play on WinXP system’s I’ve touched. However, there are still applications out there which expect to run with administrator privileges and balk if run without them. Now we’re back to that shaky foundation.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that MS releases security fixes on a timely basis. The current server DNS exploit is a decent example. The advisory was issued Apr 12, the fix is planned for May 8 (there are workarounds, I know). MS is a gargantuan organization, and I’m sure that they moved to these monthly security rollups as a consequence of the process they need to run through to get the fix QA’d for all their products, etc. Regardless of the reasons for the delay, I think a month is a long time.
Last year, I believe an IE exploit went unpatched for almost two months when MS skipped one of the monthly security releases. IMHO, that was a greater sin than the DNS issue, due to IE’s install base. I don’t remember what the specific vulnerability was and I don’t really feel like looking right now, but I remember being relieved that I wasn’t running an MS operating system.
To sum up, I think MS does hold value to someone, somewhere. Just not for me. And judging by the experience of my family and friends, it could do with a long overdue kick in the pants, security-wise. Let’s hope that’s what Vista represents.
I’m not holding my breath, though.