Microsoft Making Money

For the first time, the XBox is expected to be profitable in 2008. How refreshing that Microsoft will finally start making money. Everyone knows that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and that Microsoft makes a lot of money. But I read some statistics from a Yahoo Business article recently that helped put their profitability in perspective.

Microsoft announced their quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. That means Microsoft made $55 million a day of pure profit. The article goes on to help us understand what kind of money that is.

Do some quick math and you'll learn it takes Microsoft only about...

• four days to exceed Starbucks' quarterly net income of $205 million.
• one week to exceed Nike's quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
• two weeks to exceed McDonalds' quarterly net income of $762 million.
• two weeks to exceed Apple's quarterly net income of $770 million.
• 18 days to exceed Google's quarterly net income of $1 billion.
• 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola's quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
• five weeks to exceed IBM's quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
• 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart's quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.

The Wow certainly does start now. With this kind of revenue and these sized pockets, they can afford to sit on unprofitable products (like the XBox and Zune) until Sony or Apple screws up and they are profitable. Good for them.

Three weeks to make more money than Coka-Cola?

Dude, your getting Linux

Speaking of offering alternative Operating Systems to Vista, Dell confirmed that it will offer Linux on select Dell models.

I’m no Linux cheerleader, but I’m glad to see things moving in this direction and Linux (open source alternatives in general) getting more public exposure. For most people, that is non geeks (and even often geeks), Linux is painful. Weather it be lack of software support, mainstream titles, or the 1992 style UI’s. This could help change that.

So what’s the big deal? Linux is already free, what is this this going to change? I’m glad you asked. First of all you can buy a new Dell without Windows which you are otherwise forced to buy with a new machine, lower price. This will give Linux more recognition, press, and interest. Most importantly, it will increase developer (software and driver) support, for an eventually more widely accepted, more usable, Linux. These two factors (depending on it’s popularity through Dell and otherwise) could force Microsoft to both acknowledge and respect the open source community and reflect this in their quality and pricing. Oh yeah, it would also be nice of Apple to release a Linux iTunes, but they don't want Linux to succeed any more than Microsoft.

A wider adoption of Linux could also forces the open standards issue a little more which is something Microsoft tends to ignore when it’s convenient or when it helps their sales model.

It’s nice to see Dell bucking Microsoft and Intel, it keeps everyone honest.

As a side note according to Dells profile page, Michael Dell's home laptop runs Ubuntu. It's okay Mike, you don't need any street cred.

PDF vs. XPS

A day before Vista is released, Adobe announced its intent to submit PDF (Portable Document Format) for publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This move would forfeit Adobe's control over the PDF specification.

It seems fairly obvious that Adobe feels threatened by the proliferation of Microsoft Office, the impending domination of Office 2007, and finding itself head to head with XPS, Offices native portable document format (also an open standard). At this point Microsoft is the only company that could breed a competitor to the PDF format and Adobe knows this.

XPS will share many features of PDF format. It can support editable metadata, annotations, digital signatures, hyperlinks, bookmarks, text selection, all the typical features most people will need. Microsoft or its partners will also make available free XPS viewers for Windows (duh), Macintosh, Unix, and Linux to help it get the largest grasp possible.

First, I am glad PDF will finally be an international standard. Hopefully some of the flakiness will get ironed out quicker. However I'm not happy it took them smelling a competitor on their heels to open the standard.

Second, competition is good, but not in this arena. There should be ONE standard, fonts and graphic formats are already enough of a pain. It's possible that these two formats can peacefully coexist without frustrating users, but not likely.

Third, Adobe has become complaisant and therefore the quality of their Acrobat Reader has suffered and the PDF format has not grown as quickly or elegantly as it should. This impending move should change that.

I hope XPS is around long enough to make Adobe (and others) work on making the PDF standard better, and then fall of the face of the earth. Adobe is the company that needs to be providing an open portable document format. They just need to be doing it better.

Office 2008

Hurry up.
TUAW Office 2008 gallery.