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Comment by volski | Hacker News Reader

Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services...

It's easy to bash on them, but they make quality products in a diverse range of markets. Sure they fail and fail big, but who the hell doesn't? If you have made anything successful, you've probably failed 100s of times. It comes with the territory.

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Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services

Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.

Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)

Server and Tools Business?

Yes.

Are you only including developers, or all the people who work on a product? I imagine that MS has a rather large team of non-developers working on products as well.

You want to be careful with that metric. You know the cleaners don't make much money, why not fire them?

I did actually mean all the people that work in development on the product. That is, in MS terms, all SDE, SDET, and PMs. I happen to know this figure is accurate for Windows (over a million per developer), although that doesn't include sales/marketing, administrative costs, etc. As for the cleaners comment, I don't really get your point.

Anyway, my statistic wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, just proof that server is actually making money over here.

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