When the article finally ran, I was quoted as saying, “The experience is much like text browsing in the early days of the Internet.”

I don’t even remember saying that, and even if I did, it wasn’t a point of the conversation. Reporters take what they need to fit their story.

I saw on my friend Mark’s blog that he had been… uh… quoted? misquoted? unquoted? in a Forbes article on Microsoft’s midlife crisis. Lately Mark has had a few entries critical of tech journalism. Amen. The sad part is that Mark is only looking at…

Before the XBox launched, Microsoft Games was profitable. Microsoft Home and Entertainment has not been profitable since. Their smaller losses in the last two quarters are probably a function of Halo 2. The fact remains that the Xbox will reach the end of line and the console was a loss leader for the entire run. To me, that is a win for Sony. After all, how many companies out there can report two successive quarters of $100 million+ losses and remain in business, let alone call this “being in good shape” because they didn’t bleed a billion dollars a year?

I don’t disagree with you that Microsoft is in good shape. I’d just qualify your statement to: “Windows Client, Information Work, Business Solutions, and Servers and Tools are making money, and the other three are not bleeding significantly.” That’s not bad diversity for the tech industry: Apple only recently has added a second profitable product category (iPod), Oracle pretty much makes money off of variations of a single product (database) and Google’s revenue is tied to a single thing (ads).

The issue Microsoft is facing is that for some reason they are having an increasingly harder time maintaining their monopoly. It is easy to overlook the fact that Palm is still alive in spite of its incompetence and numerous name product iterations on Microsoft’s part (WinCE, HandheldPC, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Windows SmartPhone). Windows CE is going to be eclipsed by Linux in the embedded market if it doesn’t do something about it. UltimateTV was a failure. The XBox only tops the Game Cube in the U.S. NGSCB is now in it’s third name iteration (TCP -> Palladium -> NGCSCB) and no closer to acceptance. And what ever happened to the infamous Microsoft SPOT?

This is not to say that Microsoft is “under siege” or in danger. It just means that its growth strategies into new markets are not as effective as they have been in the past. Besides, Even Apple was profitable and had record margins in during its fall in the mid 90’s. Microsoft is many times larger and it will take a much larger mistake over a longer time before it is affected.

(I also agree that MSN could ever cannibalize Office. Remote scripted web applications may get good, but not *that* good.)

any chance you’ll be doing some work today, mr jen?