Microsoft has an okay quarter, posts $4.3B profit
By Nilay Patel 
posted October 26th 2007 12:43PM
posted October 26th 2007 12:43PM
It's quarterly report time, and we doubt the boys in Redmond mind taking a little shine off Apple's big day with their first quarter results -- especially since Microsoft posted profits of $4.3B on revenues of $13.7B, an increase of 23 percent over last year. The company attributed the great quarter not only to a 90-percent spike in Xbox 360 demand due to what the what analysts are amusingly calling the "Halo effect," but also to strong performance by both Vista and Office -- Microsoft says demand for Vista is "encouraging," especially in markets like Brazil, India, and China. There wasn't much mention of the company's recent investment in Facebook or how Bill and the boys plan on reversing the online division's loss of $264M, but when you're playing around with four billion in profits, we suppose you can ignore pocket change like that.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Wanna sell that wii? j.k. Seriously though you are lucky then but time will tell they did not give the 3yr extension because its a good peice of engineering now did they.
I got my 360 at launch. I've had no problems with it whatsoever. But then again, I'm not an idiot. I know that electronics need ventilation, and not to be stuffed in a closet.
IF I had a PS3, I would never play it...I HAVE a Wii and never play it...I have a gaming PC and don't use it to play games...my 360 gets all the play time...Yea, it has problems, but there's a new version out there right now that supposed to fix most of the problems.
I've had an Xbox for over a year...and I've had to send it in once...and yea it was a pain...but Halo 3 and Orange Box sooooooooooooo make it worth it!
I have a release day xbox and a release day elite. Both work great and have never failed. Sure...they recognized a problem by extending the warranty but there are still plenty of us that never had a problem.
Dude you just ahve very bad luck. i've had my x-box for over a year and the only problem i had was with GHII which is supposedly made like a piece of junk and intended to break. The system itself works great. When I bought mine I got the extended 3 year warranty from Best Buy, it only cost me $50 and I already got most of it back cause my original controller broke. And it was no hassle i just went to the store and they gave me a brand new one.
The Helo effect may be over but i heard something about Gears 2 which will probably maintain the high sales for 360.
The Wii is as people mentioned on this blog is just not entertaining in the long term. The basic fact is that console companies make money from gaming licenses not from the console itself. So you have the Wii which outsels 360 and PS3 combined. But majority of Wii players are not hardcore gamers. They buy the Wii and maybe, just maybe they will buy one or more game on top. So for most of the time it sits there collecting dust. While X-box and PS3 gamers on average will spend over several hundred dollars per year on games. So figure it out, in a few years, once the Wii craze is over, Nintendo is not going to be the big winner in the end. Either way i would not spend money on a game that gives me the same graphics that I could get from my old X-box
The PS3 is a great and powerful system, but it costs to much and still has pretty much no games worth mentioning.
With regard to Vista and never trusted any Win OS, it was only when XP SP2 came out that I finally switched over from 98 SP2, it XP does work great. With that note also I would not upgrade to IE7. I use a lot of web based tools for my job and none of them work in the new explorer, one main example is the official Microsoft Web Outlook.
i wonder how the zune did, but its probabily was intended as a tax write off anyways lol
oops. I meant fanboish. :$
Microsoft/Apple three-phase business plan:
1. Collect Underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
4.Bill give money to charities
4.Steve make more Apple better than MS commercials
oops...reply to first comment.
Why did it take you guys this long to report on this?
Thats what i said. Its big news that was way downplayed by a supposed tech-site.
I agree, this is probably the biggest news in the last 3 weeks for wall street and last night is when everything happened. Every news site knew about this and have written articles on it all day, but iNgadget just didn't worry about letting anyone know. had it been apple, iNgadget would have posted about the story the second it happend.
They sure did take long to report... Bravo to Microsoft for finally turning a profit on the Xbox. And for being credited with the whole stock market upturn (CNNMoney).
In regards to the Vista nay sayers... It has sold 88 Million copies (I will not mention Ubuntu or OS X sales/download figures) and don't say that people don't use the copies. I have 3 copies that I use all the time (Media Center, Laptop, Desktop).
I just gotta put this out there: I had a very bad experience with Vista on a Lenovo laptop - it would crash, especially if you tried to watch a DVD and play a game at the same time (like the built-in chess or minesweeper games). Hated it, sent it back. Then my girlfriend and my roommate both got Dell M1330s and love them. I am really impressed with the Media Center integration with the XBOX360 (much nicer than just browsing filenames like XP share), and the system has been wonderfully stable. The only app that seems to have trouble is Firefox (crashes once in a while), and I'm hoping that gets cleaned up with 3.0, since 2.x was pre-vista. It isn't bad though, it always crashes "gracefully" and comes right back up, so I can't really complain.
I know it's a bit of a Mac line, but it applies equally well here: Have you ever used it? Not spent 2 minutes at someone else's computer, but really sat down and used it?
DX10?
While im aware that there are few games that use it currently, something tells me that its going to be big. Thats good enough reason for me.
@Ruben @ Oct 26th 2007 2:33PM
>>@blahh:
>>Last time i checked, consumers had a choice,
>>as well as the vendors.
Oh yeah? Then how come most vendors are still refusing to sell their new machines with Windows XP Pro pre-installed instead of Vista? Why do they make it well-nigh impossible to purchase a machine without ANY OS pre-installed, so that I can install whatever I choose (be it Vista, XP, Linux, or whatever else)?
It's always nice watching your favorite team win.
Wow! Microsoft has an outstanding quarter by all accounts and you guys at Engadget pass it off in this ho-hum way. Not only was this quarter's performance significant, but the gaming/Zune division turned it's first profit. The stock price jumped significantly on Microsoft's performance this quarter, but you guys and your anti-Microsoft ways try to make it seem like nothing.
Great job Microsoft! For all the blather here about Apple, Microsoft puts their income and growth to shame.
Oh and there's nothing wrong with Vista. I have it both of my computers and it works beautifully. I guess you just have to not be an Apple schill.
thats alot of moneys