Tanner Helland

I think this pretty well reflects Microsoft's long-term consumer risk, too.

More than half of MSFT's revenue (http://www.tannerhelland.com/4273/microsoft-money-updated-2012/) comes from Windows and Office (and over half the profit, Windows http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-defer-revenue-windows-upgrade-offer-140940839--finance.html).

Back in the 90s and early 00s, the rate of change in the PC market was amazing. The hardware you could buy in 1998 basically didn't exist in 1996, so there always was something new and exciting to spur new hardware sales.

New hardware sales represent the bulk of Microsoft's Windows licensing (the so-called "Microsoft Tax") revenue and so a large part of MSFT's profits. All MS had to do was be the default OS and their profit would grow without lifting a finger (obviously that's greatly simplified, MS had to do a lot of things).

Now that this hardware revolution is no longer taking place, MS' Windows licensing rev (and thus the huge profits) are threatened. Competition in the PC market have driven hardware profits to zero. MS and their clone makers have painted themselves into a corner.

Contrast this with Apple's strategy - produce desirable hardware that people buy for non-technical reasons (design, fashion, software, etc.) instead of raw figures (CPU, Memory, etc.). Folks will upgrade because they want to, not because they need to. That's a lot harder to pull off, but Apple seems to be doing a great job of it.

Ultimately, I think Apple's…

Win 8 moves ~40,000,000 licenses in first month. Upgrades are $39.99.

Win 7 moved ~30,000,000 in month one. Upgrades were $120 - 220/upgrade.

Vista moved 20,000,000 first month. Upgrades were $129 - 299.

MSFT is offering the DVD-version of Windows 8 for ~$30/more per copy so let's just pretend that the fair price for comparison of Windows 8 is $69.99 (since I assume far more physical media went out of Win 7 in 2009).

So that's still 1/2 the revenue per upgrade they collected in the previous cycles.

Looking at their revenue by division Windows & Win Live have been on the decline:

http://www.tannerhelland.com/wp-content/uploads/Microsoft-revenue-by-division-2010-2012.png

I wonder how drastically this will impact them - if they see a real, sustained gain in traction vs. Windows 7 adoption in the 25% range, that's not going to make up for the shortfall in revenues but certainly would help to lay a foundation for future growth in mobile / server & tools / business / etc.

I'm not sure I even have a point, just trying to sort through this data and get a sense of what it means for MSFT macro.

I think of it slightly differently - "I really appreciate the direction that Microsoft developer tools division has been heading with their adoption of open source for a growing number of their products.

They deserve big credit. But devs appreciate open source more than other consumers. it's hard to see how open source would work for, say, the parts of Microsoft that make Windows, Office or Xboxes.

it's easy for devs to think of Dev tools as Microsoft as a whole, but they're not the biggest part of it, and are not the ones who bring in the most money (I found this link: http://www.tannerhelland.com/3958/microsoft-money-updated-2011/ ).

Like it or not, the MS Windows division can therefore boss the dev tools division around (and have in Windows 8, effectively dictating the direction of .Net and WPF).

There is no such thing as an OSX server. You mean a mac mini with OSX server edition on it?

There's basically nothing that IBM does that will work on an iOS device, nevermind well. This deal is hot air, Cringely is right.

Microsoft make their money on office and exchange, as much as it pains me to point the obvious. [0]

No port of IBM software to work on an iOS device is going to make a dent in that. No IBM software will be exclusively iOS, it will be java based and available on windows and linux first, then OSX as an afterthought.

http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-2013/ [0] see operating income rather than revenue.

85% of the Microsoft Business division that is responsible for Microsoft Office comes, not unsurprisingly, from businesses:

http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-2013/

Edit: The point I was trying to make is that I wonder how important personal use of Office is to Microsoft. Arguably people either want to use what they use at work or they use something other product (in the past one of the competing office suites, probably one of the online offerings these days) - I wonder if the size of the latter category has actually changed over the years?

"Atkinson dithering is a variant of Floyd-Steinberg dithering designed by Bill Atkinson at Apple Computer, and used in the original Macintosh computer."

All recent edits :) Truth forming as we type?

There are also much older claims like this, [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_dithering

[2] https://tannerhelland.com/2012/12/28/dithering-eleven-algorithms-source-code.html