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2001 - 22.96 billion / 11.01 operating income 2017 - 90 billion / 22.3 operating income

I would love getting the crap beat out of me with my legacy junk and these figures.

You need to adjust those figures for inflation, for starters. And compare to the total performance of an index over the same time range, e.g. the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested.

23 billion in 2001 adjusted for inflation is only around 30 billion.

Compared to the sp500, msft has also killed it by a factor of 2. http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance-return....

In that chart you can also see that it has also outperformed the software industry average.

Good, now we have a valid comparison. Thanks.

Well: the proposal was to split the company into a Windows company and an Office company because they were using the Windows monopoly to enforce an Office monopoly, and requiring everyone to use their browser. Guess what? Today there is no Windows monopoly (certainly not with hipsters and their Macbooks), Office continues to dominate _because_ it runs cross-platform, and nobody uses the default Windows browser.

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