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shaky reputation?shaky reputation?Posted Nov 1, 2007 18:11 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)In reply to: i'd like to know more about this... by ipes Parent article: Mandriva CEO rants at Steve Ballmer
Outside Linux boards and maybe some EU antitrust committees, MSFT doesn't have a shaky reputation. For politicians, MSFT is a company that they want to attract to do business in their countries: they pay high salaries and hire educated people, don't pollute the environment much, and throw money to lots of local partner and vendor companies. Don't know what's going on in this case, but there are reasons other than corruption for countries to play ball with MSFT.
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agreed Posted Nov 1, 2007 18:59 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Microsoft tends to compete on deals like this by lowering their price to make it near-free. They can afford it; their marginal cost is near-zero.
linux still wins! Posted Nov 2, 2007 15:26 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] 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. ;)
linux still wins! Posted Nov 3, 2007 1:33 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] I don't buy it. If yet another nation standardizes on Microsoft Products, even if Microsoft gives it to them for free, it makes it harder for the rest of their paying customers to switch away, pure and simple due to "network effects."
err ... Posted Nov 4, 2007 19:56 UTC (Sun) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] ...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.
agreed Posted Nov 5, 2007 2:50 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] 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.
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