It is a fact that they're losing money on them no matter what the idiot salesman told you.
Microsoft makes money off exactly THREE divisions in the company - Windows, Office, and Server OS, in descending order, with Windows and Office being the biggest cash cows as they have literaly monopolies in that space. In the server space they have serious competition but they still ended up with something like a 34% margin.
Everything else, and that's MSN, Xbox/Web TV, Pocket PC, and something else I forget, is losing money. Their losses ranged from a low of like -18% for MSN to a high of -194% for their mobile division - basically WinCE and PocketPC.
So tell your buddy at Circuit City to take some business or economics classes.
"I've got friends and acquantances who stand a real good chance of loosing their homes to the storm"
Pardon me if I don't feel a lot of sympathy for people who choose to live in areas where this kind of weather is common. It's not like hurricanes just suddenly started spanking the Southeastern coastal states...
Random geeks sitting at home don't buy these things to play games or code. Big companies buy them to stick on clueless employees' desks so they can just "get the job done" instead of calling the IT department about their cup-holders being broken.
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It is a fact that they're losing money on them no matter what the idiot salesman told you.
Microsoft makes money off exactly THREE divisions in the company - Windows, Office, and Server OS, in descending order, with Windows and Office being the biggest cash cows as they have literaly monopolies in that space. In the server space they have serious competition but they still ended up with something like a 34% margin.
Everything else, and that's MSN, Xbox/Web TV, Pocket PC, and something else I forget, is losing money. Their losses ranged from a low of like -18% for MSN to a high of -194% for their mobile division - basically WinCE and PocketPC.
So tell your buddy at Circuit City to take some business or economics classes.
"I've got friends and acquantances who stand a real good chance of loosing their homes to the storm"
Pardon me if I don't feel a lot of sympathy for people who choose to live in areas where this kind of weather is common. It's not like hurricanes just suddenly started spanking the Southeastern coastal states...
Random geeks sitting at home don't buy these things to play games or code. Big companies buy them to stick on clueless employees' desks so they can just "get the job done" instead of calling the IT department about their cup-holders being broken.
I'm using IE5 running on Windows 98SE (work machine, what can I do?) and all I see are the funky question marks as well.