this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Telemetry data doesn't make the CEO rich.
Microsoft makes their money from cloud services for businesses, the desktop OS is a loss leader that's designed to get people to use the cloud services.
Office is one of the cloud services.
I don't know if it's still this way, but a decade and more ago (when I last had any professional contact with Microsoft's development) the company was effectively divided into two competing factions- the Office people and the Windows people. They had wildly different priorities for the shared tech stack, and mutually exclusive demands on the others' products, and there was a constant bun fight on who got their way. The surprising thing is, even by that era, the Office faction were the dominant one; that's where the real money was.
Then I gather the Azure faction was born and has completely dominated both, becoming a massive majority of the company's profitable business.
The gaming people (Xbox and whatnot) were always poor relations, if you're wondering, and MS R&D was its own eccentric little world which seemed to exist entirely outside of the universe inhabited by any of the others.
What cloud services, office? I find it hard to believe windows OS isn't possible
M365 including Intune, Entra, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Office.
I don't understand what you mean by "Windows OS isn't possible".
Sorry, Profitable, brain fart.
Is there a source on the OS not being profitable?
No, the source is my ass, but I work in IT sales and am specialized on MS licensing, and IMO there's just no way Microsoft can finance the constant development and cloud infrastructure needed for Windows updates on a one-time-payment of a few bucks for an OEM license.
Meanwhile, businesses are happy to pay several hundred dollars per user and year for M365 licenses if they're in the ecosystem. And for the licensing costs of large enterprises, Microsoft basically just sends in an analyst who looks at the environment and quotes a number with a lot of zeros. Which you either pay or go out of business.
It's not that Windows isn't profitable, it's that Office is insanely profitable. There's a running joke inside MS that Office pays the bills, everything else is icing on the cake.
It's not that Windows isn't profitable, it's that Office is insanely profitable. There's a running joke inside MS that Office pays the bills, everything else is icing on the cake.
It's not that Windows isn't profitable, it's that Office is insanely profitable. There's a running joke inside MS that Office pays the bills, everything else is icing on the cake.