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Microsoft Revenue Up, Tries to Hook Third World
rocketjam writes "Microsoft reported record revenue for the last quarter Thursday due to increased sales of personal computers. Analysts were impressed with the company's overall performance, however they expressed concern about the continuing drop in unearned revenue, reflecting Microsoft's difficulty in signing up customers for long-term, sustainable business contracts. The $400 million drop in unearned revenue was less than the drop in the last quarter but still exceeded many analyst's expectations. The company's continuing problem in gaining long-term contracts is generally attributed to growing security concerns among customers and company's unwillingness to go along with Microsoft's 'Software Assurance' upgrade subscription plan." Also in the news: Microsoft is donating a pile of software to the United Nations -- retail value, $1 billion; wholesale value, maybe $1 million or so -- attempting to hook the Third World on Microsoft software.
third world markets have very limited economies and are more open to alternative (read: kazaa) solutions, I can't see Microsoft ever making any significant profit there. If anything, they'll loose money faster than they'll gain it.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio: Howard Dean's campaign for President was found dead at 9 months in Iowa. There is no denying the stupidity of many slashdotters and other vile liberal scum for supporting, sending $ and working for this raving lunatic. Truly a filthy Linux hippie icon!
Of course not! Microsoft is GOOD! Think about it. How else would computers have entered the mainstream and household so easily if it had not been for Microsoft's user-friendly OS? If Microsoft never started Windows, then computers would still be used only by hobbyists and university students, and the Internet would only be used by government for mission-critical applications! If more people hadn't "cut their teeth" on computing by using Windows, then the computing industry would be WAY smaller than it is today!
the actual hard cost to Microsoft for the donation is orders of magnitude less than the fake "value"
You see, if you ever stepped out of your mom's basement and saw the real world, you would notice a strange breed of people who write software and get paid for it. No, not your filthy nerdy friends hacking some Perl scripts, but people called developers.
As the developers like to get paid (not everyone can survive on Pop-Tarts and mom's weekly allowance, mind you), the issue of development costs comes in.
Think about it.
In my experience, you don't (usually) get legally bound to Microtwonk Software, you usually get locked into it by some critical peripheral software -
Translation: Linux still has shitty driver support.
And people like you blame it on Microsoft.
What a hoot.
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slowly replacing the ones spawned during the Windows 9x days.
As an aside: I remember the old days, when new Linux-users often acted like a dog that had gotten out of it's yard for the first time. "I'm freeeeeee" etc. etc. Until they wandered out into the 'road' of some cracker getting root on their box. (Slackware, for instance, didn't assign a root password in the install script, or warn the user in any way they should, until version 4.0). Whomp! Just like the doggie.
These days people get just as chained to big bloated forced-hardware-upgrade loops, re: KDE and Gnome. And the din about BSOD and 'machine locked up' has faded because Microsoft's software has gotten better. Only the weird old fart who hasn't used a Microsoft product since Windows 95 carries on about that anymore.
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