[Achshar]

The company was in bad time, now the scene look much better. With windows 7 a success and all the enterprise growth, with Xbox and windows 8, they are in a much better position. Although I am not nearly qualified enough to comment on Balmer's performance as a multi-billion dollar company's CEO, but he seems to do fine. Bill Gates set the bar high for Steve, and weather Steve under-performed or not remains a matter of speculation.

[Tyrannosaurs]

Doing fine?

The MS share price has underperformed both the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones since he took over and a company that had never posted a loss now has.

The Xbox has lost money over all time (if you include initial costs), the Zune failed, Windows 8 is yet to be released. Despite massive investment last time I checked their on-line services division (give or take 400 million users) still lost money.

And they've gone from being the tech company you couldn't ignore to one that you can.

The only reason it looks fine is that Windows and Office keep bringing home the bacon but with the declining PC market (except Macs) and the rise of the smartphone and tablet markets (in which MS are currently, roughly, nowhere), how long will that be for?

[pmelendez]

Where did you get the data to say that Xbox had lost money?

Did you include royalties from each title and dev kits? I just would like to remind you that the only company in the game industry who make money with hardware is Nintendo. All other ones lose money on hardware and recover those loses from titles sells.

If you do have the support for saying that Xbox has lost money I will be very interested on reading that :)

[Tyrannosaurs]

The original Xbox launched in 2001 and the business unit lost money consistently until it's first profitable year in FY 2007/8 [1]. This is the business unit remember so includes all income including royalties from games and so on.

The same article also mentions that the year before the unit lost $1.9bn (the red ring of death issues hitting it hard).

You'd have hoped that once it turned profit it would have been upwards from there but while it remained profitable in 2009, the figures dropped 66% to a $169m [2]. In 2010 profits were up to $618m and then in 2011 $1.32bn which is obviously great but even if you add those four profitable years together you're only $500m or so over the loss from 2007.

Against that you've got all the development costs in the run up to the launch of the 360 in 2005 and the entire loss making life of the original Xbox (launched 2001 but would have been running up development costs for a couple of years before that at least).

The success recently and the launch of Kinnect will have likely increased it's profitability since 2011, but while I don't have links (though I have gone through it before, I just don't have the time now) I don't believe it's come close to wiping out those original losses.

[1] http://kotaku.com/5026559/xbox-division-finally-reports-prof... [2] http://kotaku.com/5321559/xbox-division-sees-66-percent-slid...