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No, they need about $8.4 billion dollars in profit for the console division to recoup it's losses. As I understand it the consoles (including games, live and peripherals) themselves have never turned a profit, though the entertainment division has had at least one miniscule profit.

That 8.4 billion comes from:

By 2005 the Xbox had lost $4 billion.
(http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2005/09/12/ microsoft-management-software_cz_vm_0913microsoft. html)
In 2005 the entertainment division lost 391 million.
(http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY05/earn_ rel_q4_05.mspx)
In 2006, the Xbox 360 lost $1.26 billion
(http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2006/10/13/micro soft-lost-126-billion-launching-the-xbox-360.htm)
In 2007, Microsoft has lost $2.76 billion
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/2006/10/m icrosoft_fisca_6.html
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Microsoft-Loses-2 89-Million-in-Q2-With-Xbox-360-2544.html
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 16432

Now there might be some overlap between Fiscal 2005, and the initial number but given the number's $8.6 billion, even an overlap of $200 million is insignificant to the final number. It is highly unlikely that the Xbox group will recoup those losses in this console generation.

Actual link:
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/2006/10/m icrosoft_fisca_6.html

The System Rating tool is still buggy and can use some work like there may a game that needs a 4 cpu but only a 2 gpu or there may be a game that needs a 2 cpu but a 4 gpu and this tool makeing the part that has the lowest number the number for your entire system.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060529-6934 .html
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/16/vista_computers_ to_have_5_performance_tiers/
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/2006/05/v ista_system_ra.html

Oh is it??

Care to elaborate?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829355,00.as p
http://www.betanews.com/article/Analyst_MS_Office_ Formats_Not_Open/1107211516
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/006232.ht ml

Actually, that Microsoft settlement was rejected at least some judges for some states:

• Cnet article
• Microsoft Monitor

At least some judge had some sense.

The interesting thing is that Gates does represent the engineer/technical side of Microsoft: he's even given up his managerial role (barring Chairman of the board which is a nonexecutive role) and become Chief Software Architect. And oh yes, he's definitely in charge, though of late Microsoft has been trying to copy the IBM playbook and integrate marketing better into its engineering process and has brought in non-engineer types (outsiders, even) into leading roles to fix Microsoft's marketing and sales.

The bigger point here is that engineers grow into finance and management -- it's quite common in several industries. You might even have to do this yourself some day. If you do, you'll be surprised how quickly computing's holy wars cease to be of interest.

I suppose, if by "failed", you mean "failed to achieve complete and total domination". They certainly make a profit on their server OS, server tools, development tools, hardware, XBox, ...

I thought I was quite clear about exactly what I meant by "failed": failed to achieve #1 position in the market and profitable status, which is what all the Slashdot articles have been suggesting Xbox 360 will do in the console market. In fact, this latest one seems to think they'll get over 50% market share like they did with Windows on the desktop.

Thanks for spreading more Microsoft propaganda, anyway. As of this quarter, Xbox is still losing money. SQL Server is a distant third in market share after DB2 and Oracle. Entertainment software and mobile devices both run at a loss. Microsoft's developer tools business isn't evidence that they can achieve another big success, because it basically has no competition--if you want to develop Windows applications for current and future versions of Windows, you have no serious alternative.

When it comes to server OS market share, note that most pro-Microsoft articles (e.g. from IDC) deliberately undercount Linux and BSD by only counting sales of boxed product. Restricting ourselves to more statistically valid data, we see that Microsoft's web server market share is a fraction of OSS's. In messaging, Exchange may or may not be #1 in commercial offerings (it's highly disputed), but add in OSS and their market share is well below 50%.

So in short: you're wrong, or deliberately lying.

It's easy to get market share or profits; Microsoft could make Xbox 360 the #1 console by sales volume just by dumping (i.e. selling below cost) even more than they did with the first Xbox. That's not what I call a business success, though.

How freaking sad do you have to be to be convinced that anyone who doesn't rabidly hate the XBox as much as you do has to be a "Microsft astroturfer"?

So I guess you want us to believe you're just an ill-informed idiot, rather than a paid shill? OK by me.

You're right. Microsoft has never been named in a lawsuit and is clearly the safer choice in that respect.

My advice to Microsoft and its partners: You may have thought iPod was reason to take Apple more seriously. Urgency has increased. While I simply don't see Apple stealing mounds of Windows PC marketshare, I do see problems for your collective digital entertainment strategies. Right now, about two thirds of consumers have a computer in the living room, mostly Windows users. A bunch of Windows users have purchased iPods (JupiterResearch clients, we have data. Please contact colleague Michael Gartenberg or me to get it). What happens when iPod Windows users buy spanking, new $499 iMacs and put them in the main room of the house, same place you'd like to put entertainment PCs? Another way to look at the new Mac is as a low-cost entertainment media hub that gets right to the digital content consumers most care about: photos and music.

I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.

It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.

He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.

I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough. Where have we heard this before? :)

I can't, but the guy(s) at Microsoft Monitor comment on it regularly. It's the blog for Joe Wilcox at Jupiter Research. Google search of their site.

Rhapsody uses WMA streams:

info

Already happening. The EU anti-trust investigation was around media player. However that seems driven mostly by Real's sour grapes ("People don't use real because WMP is on the desktop". No, people don't use real because it's been a bloated heap of spyware driven shit, with an awful set of codecs).

Written by Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research it starts:

I'm a bit stunned by the press feeding frenzy set off by comments (here) Yusuf Mehdi, MSN corporate VP, made during a Wednesday speech. News report after news report claimed that Microsoft would unleash an iPod-killing music player for 50 bucks.

The problem: That's not at all what Mr. Mehdi said.

Turnaround is fairplay! (although, I'd personnally have preferred if Apple had patented a male sexual organ in dire need of Viagra instead...)

Bottom line: I'm not convinced Microsoft's philosophical approach to rights-protected content is one consumers will embrace.

As far as I know (and as far as this article says) Rhapsody does use WMA for streaming. Real simply bought it, and, while they certainly do want it to use Real format, the upgrade is simply not there (also try go to their help section and enter "what codec" into question field -- result says WMA and is updated 01/08/2004 06:49 PM )
Which makes the fact that Real sued Microsoft even more funny, and wish to cozy up to anyone but Microsoft somewhat more logical.

I recently noticed that Microsoft is going to license ClearType and the FAT filesystem. Apparently, MS is tired of everybody using FAT. Maybe it's been discussed on /. already, but this can either mean third-party software to bring ClearType to other platforms including Win2K and Linux, or it can mean no FAT support in Linux -- maybe it'll mean both

Microsoft Opens Up Licensing
Microsoft Plays Intellectual Property Licensing Catch-Up
ClearType Technology and Patent License
Microsoft unveils new intellectual property policy

I don't have the links, but I read several posts by Mac users in other forums who have argued that Quartz under MacOS X is better than ClearType since Quartz more accurately renders text on screen as it would appear in print. Of course, some of the posts were just the typical Mac elitism, but some even said the anti-aliasing unde r Linux was better. Maybe they were talking about GNOME???

I wasn't sure whether GNOME was using sub-pixel rendering or straight anti-aliasing. I do remember liking the way text was rendered under GNOME though. Is there a way to add GNOME's anti-aliasing to old applications like rxvt and xv or WindowMaker and fvwm, or is this an impossibility since none of these apps are built using GNOME in the first place?

Folks who have seen the code report quite a few profane remarks by developers. Microsoft typically sanitizes comments for source code used in the Shared Source program. That the code contains these remarks has Microsoft believing the leak did not come through the Shared Source program.