you have inadvertently indicated exactly why the desktop, up front cash drain as it might seem, is actually a huge cash gusher. That is because it is the piece of the ecosystem which users bond to most intimately, and if they don't like your endpoint UI, they sure aren't going to be axed to use your (highly profitable) backend services. Witness how Ubuntu, arguably the original "pretty" Linux, dominates amongst startups doing cloud. And why Windows lost so much ground. And why AAPL was so stupid to dump the Xserve. Can you imagine what might have happened if Apple took just 1 or 2 billion out of its 250 billion cash horde and "did BSD" on the cloud? Properly?

Tell that to the software vendors selling software packages to Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android and consoles.

They would be all out of business if that was the case.