I think that you have some zeros in the wrong place.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...t/gross-profit
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/r...r19/index.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT...DkUUM12fvAuS11

He even said, "If anyone steals an operating system, I want it to be ours".

There's a widespread belief that Microsoft tacitly encouraged the widespread piracy of Windows in China and elsewhere because it got people hooked on the system. I don't know how much truth there is in that.

Of course there is also the fact that every computer you buy on the high street has Windows on it. Most people have never used anything else. It's a bit like the qwerty keyboard, which was invented originally to slow down typing so that the typewriter keys didn't get entangled. Now it's just a pain but nobody can use anything else because no one has any idea where the keys are if they're not where qwerty puts them.

The annual revenue was "only" $147.114B for 2020, with their fiscal year ending 2020, if one accepts Enron-style accounting. Their OEM monopoly is slipping and so is their monopoly on productivity suite formats, to the point that they've probably lost their main money-maker, the monopoly rents on the two. They've moved much of their activities under the wing of Azure and yet have had several rounds of mass-firings last year with thousands of jobs with Azure getting the axe with each round. They also got a $2.4B handout this last summer from the US government, which might be the only real money they have.

However, you are right that one should not underestimate them. I would add to that the importance of not underestimating both the cult-like nature of the beast as well as the espionage potential that so many governments, big and small, cling to. Some would say that latter point is what has kept them afloat the last decade or two.

My complaint about Windows being a (rather poor) game system is that gaming is the only possible excuse for keeping such a system around. As most businesses and agencies do not play games, therefore there is zero rationale for keeping Windows around. As we see in the Netherlands' example mentioned a few posts earlier, those responsible for pushing M$ products into any public or private infrastructure did so on purpose and need to be brought to trial.

One risk with the SolarWinds exploit mentioned in the OP is that M$ gets away with trying further to be presented as both critical infrastructure and as synonmous with computing. It is neither and it is costing all of us any time it gets pushed into production and connected to the net, especially as it tries to keep one foot in the server market.

Ya there is. One thing windows does well, is make a computer usable to the, uh, click on an icon and wait for something to happen crowd. And that is probably 90-95% of computer users in the US. We refer to that as "idiot proofing".

If it weren't for windows, and how it does everything but click the icon, the US would probably have to let go 60-70% of all office workers. That may be rude but it is also fact.

Some of those windows users could be made to learn what an IP address and route is, what html is, make a simple script to get thing done, how to edit a pdf, etc, without microsoft doing it for them. But most are too thick. You would have to fire them.

If your country is better, I am glad for you.

Plus, it comes on the machine from the factory. And a whole lot of MCSE's. They go to school for that.

You seem to have had bad experiences with office workers. I worked in a scientific library between 1976 and 1998. We had a mainframe computer and the interface was cli only. None of our office workers had any problems with that. They were used to keyboards; the main difference was that they had a vdu to look at rather than a sheet of paper and the text they typed was editable.

The input screen was all boxes (something like ncurses I suppose) and they typed into them. No problem there. But how did they learn to launch the input program? Simple. I told them that the computer had the equivalent of a switchboard operator. It was called the operating system. When you first logged in, you were talking to this operator and you gave the name of the program you wanted to talk to, just as you would when you rang up a company and got the switchboard. And you would be put through.

Maybe clericals in the US are dumber than our English ones.

Yep, that latter, that of an OEM monopoly, has been very problematic factor going back to the days of the illegial, per-processor fees. Mostly home users don't notice or care what is on the machine when it comes from the shop. Same for many office workers.

However, the part about bullshit jobs is an important point. M$ Windows is for empire builders who get off on head counts rather than getting products or services to market. The presence of M$ products in place of an infrastructure is also a key enabler of bullshit jobs. M$ is not about getting anything done, rather the opposite, and it spreads like a stain through businesses and agencies as staff who are evaluated on results are displaced by those who are evaluated on keeping a chair warm.

Incidents like the SolarWinds crack are just a side effect.

You're right.

If Microsoft really would want to stop the piracy of their operating system there are a lot of technical ways they could have done that. They did not. Nowadays you can just download it and if you don't like to apply a simple crack and you want an official installation you can just buy a license key for € 5 at your local online gamekey discounter.

If they would not have kept this easy, maybe all China would now be running Red Flag Linux.

Though people forget over time, that's never been part of their business model which has actually centered around the monopoly rents. The rents are where they made their money, 80% or so, not on the sale of software or services. So therefore maintaining the monopoly was paramount, even going back to the late 1990s:

Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
-- https://www.cnet.com/news/gates-buffett-a-bit-bearish/

Thus their priority has been to promote "piracy" as means to inhibit an actual competition.

Yep. You see what they did there.

Interesting. Maybe someone mistook a comma for a period/decimal point since https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleY...?code=MSFT&rev reports that number as "143,015. Million which I take as a 10^6 exponent. In either case it is one helluva lot of money/power. We agree on much. I just don't like the concept that gaming supports MS or is any reason to disqualify a server OpSys. Gaming is multimedia, pure and simple, without which modern advertising would not exist. My first GUI was IBM's OS/2 so I am fully aware of the cautious, love/hate relationship between business and multimedia. OS/2 had 4 x 8bit or 16bit games like Chess and Reversi in 1996 but had streaming video that same year. Lack of production tools for multimedia hurt them a lot. It was said that if IBM bought out a successful sushi company they would market it as "raw, dead fish".

(Aside: Sashimi is the raw fish. Sushi is a rice dish that may or not include fish, which may or not be raw.)


On the original topic, security researchers Bruce Schneier and Brian Krebs both have a number of blog articles on the subject, though neither of them is listing specific concerns.

Russia is always good to unite Americans as common enemy. China is not such good. There are diversities. Biden promised "to heal nation" - seems one of ways of healing is rather traditional - to make Russia nation-wide enemy. I don't believe all this hacking at percentage was such disastrous as presented in USA media - due to Putin sarcastic congratulations to Russia intelligence - hey guys keep going good work. In really serious matter Putin keeps himself quiet. It is all laugh. Something like: look Americans are just idiots.

If by 'idiots' you mean Americans place convenience over even their own Freedom, @igadoter, then perhaps we can at least somewhat agree.



Please clarity, if you would.

I'm an American, and the rules of comedy are that you can make fun of your own kind.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r9g0EYIUfX4

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6CdfsCz1oKo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Be9f7Ovgg