[auctiontheory]

I'm truly hard-pressed to think of any value Microsoft as a conglomerate of these divisions, actually provides

You must not be an enterprise IT buyer. Here's how it works:

All large corporations use some Microsoft product, be it Windows, Exchange, Office, or something else. And they get volume discounts and significant other discounts off the list price.

"Oh, you want to replace Office with OpenOffice? Hmmm, seems we made a mistake calculating your Exchange licenses - the price just went up 300%."

Is it becoming more clear?

[mbreese]

Isn't that how they got in trouble last time? That's hardly a value for the consumer.

(I know that's not what happened before, but it's still anti-competitive)

[auctiontheory]

It's not a value to the consumer. It's an albatross to the consumer.

It's a value provided to the bottom line of each of the MSFT divisions from/by the existence of the unified Microsoft corporate entity.