[lolipop1]

As I remember correctly, Office saves everything else at MS right now (by a large margin, followed by OSes). The gaming has recently been making more money than they are loosing (and will probably become their next important money maker). But the rest of the revenue makers are so low compared to those three that it's not even funny.

I suspect that they will probably announce service based offering (consulting) type in the long run (5-10 years maybe?) because they might not be able to sustain high margins of profit on Office and Windows sales due to competition and alternatives.

Right now they don't seem to have a great vision either, so we'll see were they are heading...

[Locke1689]

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...

[lolipop1]

So I guess that we can say for sure (2009-2010 numbers) that online stuff is now loosing money, windows is now doing better that office, and gaming is quite behind but stable and profitable (albeit a lot less that office or windows). Let's be frank too, were talking about billions here, so those segments are quite big.

[Locke1689]

I can't tell you specifics but I can tell you that Microsoft knows the cloud is losing money for now.

[unexpected]

That's okay though - At least MS is smart enough to make an investment in a nascent technology. I bet everyone is losing money on the cloud, or barely breaking even.

Even Rackspace's Net Income is only 10 million dollars, coming off of 178 million dollars worth of revenue.

New businesses take time to grow.

[keithwarren]

MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) has been a business component for them for a long time. Whereas someone like IBM-GS seeks to make as much margin as they can off the services side, MCS is in the unique position of being willing to make smaller margins because the licensing revenue is significant. That attitude has been changing in the past 5 years but it is still part of the MCS culture.