Jerry McBride wrote:
> >
> > The XBox 360 has accumulated losses that must be approaching 10 billion
> > dollars. The XBox division was recently merged with another (for financial
> > business aspects) in order to hide/mitigate the impact. Also see:
> >
>
> 10 BILLION in accumulated losses. Wow! No wondeer Bill Gates and company are
> jumping ship...
>
Well, you have to temper these statements with some reality, jerry. A
quick visit to your favorite financial reports site will give you
access to the MSFT annual report which shows that Mr. Softee overall is
up some 11% in revenue and 13% in profits for the latest year. Maybe
11% doesn't sound like so much, but its about $5,000,000,000 dollars
and the profits are UP almost 2 billion bucks. How much money does
your own company rake in? Mine barely makes the $5B that MS increased
by. That's like MS growing a whole new company the same size as mine
and mine is pretty damn big by most standards.
Now that may just show how MS has the $10B to lose, but it makes you
wonder what would have happened if they had not bothered with the Xbox
and so might have not lost those bucks. It is easy to see. One thing
that is odd is that their losses for the last quarter were way under a
billion bucks, more like $380M for the whole division, which was way up
from the previous quarter and year. To have lost $10B in aggregate
means that they would have had to have been selling Xbox for over 10
years and I don't think that is so.
They did merge the Xbox business with their wildly profitable Web TV
offering, though, so maybe there is some truth to that part of the
story.
> May they can re-release the first xbox under a new name and make a few bucks
> that way.
>
One thing you need to check, too, is how this industry is doing
overall. MS lost almost a billion bucks last year, but look at poor
old Sony:
http://psp.ign.com/articles/721/721539p1.html
"Despite the rosy bottom line, Sony's game division caused massive
damage to the company's overall profit. Sony Computer Entertainment
dropped from 172.8 billion yen ($1.5 billion) to 122.5 billion yen
($1.1 billion). The group's operating loss sunk to 26.8 billion yen
($2.32 billion) from last year's loss of only 5.9 billion yen ($51.1
million)."
Now that's double Mr. Softee's losses. Another curious statistic is
that Sony's annual nut was 1.5B bucks, which is pretty far behind the
$4B for the home entertainment division at Microsoft. Is MS already
more than double the size of Sony in this market? Wow!
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