Mandriva CEO rants at Steve Ballmer

Microsoft's advantage there is that there's always lots of money changing hands already, and
"discounts" and "marketing support", don't count as bribes; and threats to reduce either of
them don't count as extortion.

That's a win win situation for linux, although perhaps not for Mandriva.  If linux can force
MS to lower their prices to compete it only helps consumers.  Bribery, zero margins (not
true), etc. is unstainable for MS.  It may have traditionally seemed sustainable with the
large amounts of cash that they have, but that is only against other vendors.  Linux can
outlast MS since its margins are even lower!  So, in the mean time even if customers still
choose MS because of the lower cost (and/or bribe money they receive) they still win because
of linux!  So while I can understand why Mandriva might feel slighted (they may not outlast
MS's cash forever,) they are not linux.  In the long term, MS can only beat linux on features,
good luck with that one. ;)

...that's exactly what is illegal under any kind of antitrust law. There is a highly
entertaining biography of Thomas J. Watson on Wikipedia, for example.

Their marginal costs may be near zero, but they've got some darn huge 
fixed costs they need to amortize.  Billions of dollars a quarter.

Now microsoft just had a _spectacular_ quarter, with Vista and the current 
Office finally making a profit for them, which bumped their stock to 
around $37/share.  (They've been hovering between $25 and $30 since 2000, 
their all-time high from the start of 2000 would be a split-adjusted 
$50/share, for reasons I explained at the time here: 
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00... .)

Here's their 5 year stock price.  Notice the spike at the right.
http://quote.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=5y

That said, here's their most recent quarterly report:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00011931250...

According to that, they had $7.8 billion in expenses this quarter.  (And 
over $13 billion in income.)

Here's their most recent annual report:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/00011931250...

That puts their 2007 expenses at $32 billion and change (on $51 billion 
revenue).

Their biggest expenses are employee salaries and office space for them.  
From the 10k:

> As of June 30, 2007, we employed approximately 79,000 people on a
> full-time basis, 48,000 in the United States and 31,000 internationally.
> Of the total, 31,000 were in product research and development, 24,000 in
> sales and marketing, 13,000 in product support and consulting services,
> 3,000 in manufacturing and distribution, and 8,000 in general and
> administration.

If each of them only cost the company $150k (and between salary, health 
insurance, social security taxes, training, and so on, that would be very 
cheap) that would be 11.85 billion annually, right there.

Now add in office space.  Note that the University of Texas at Austin only 
has about 50,000 students on a 40 acre campus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_State...

So yeah, msft can afford to throw money around, but their annual expenses 
are more than their cash on hand.  (They've got about $21 billion, they 
threw their big cash hoard at stock buybacks and dividends during the 
seven years of wall street famine they just broke out of.)  They couldn't 
afford to give windows and office away to everybody for free for a year.  
They do actually need to keep making money to stay in business.