Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

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I was there for this celebration. It was all in good fun. The funeral was such a small portion of the day, it's being way overblown. It was like 15 minutes of an all day carnival. There was games, monster trucks to ride in, live music, and all other kinds of celebratory stuff going on (face painting ftw!). There was an all out party going on.

I'm on the Windows team, but the WinMo7 guys worked their asses off and actually made something pretty friggin cool. They deserved to party.

As for Microsoft's chances in this market, people never thought Microsoft would dominate Sony in video games. I wouldn't count Microsoft out just yet... it'll be interesting to say the least.

Quick question I realise you probably don't know the answer to - why no Android?

As fas as I can see, Blackberries and iPhones aren't direct competitors to WM7. Microsoft's customers are HTC, Samsung et al, and at the moment the only other company providing an OS to them is Google.

I thought Microsoft was burning something like a billion dollars a year in losses in order to in order to be in the video game console market. Is that impression wrong? Has MS made a profit yet in games?

They haven't recouped all the money they'd invested yet (still about $4 billion short), but they are now turning a profit of a few hundred million each quarter

Meaning they stopped digging a deeper hole?

Or that they do continue to dig, only now it's filling up faster then they can dig?

Meaning that in a few years their investment in the games market will have paid off probably. Investments are long-term strategies.

Video games are such a volatile market, I wouldn't say "probably" about much of anything. That's a big chunk of the danger in dropping so much money to try to grab some market share, expecting to make the money back someday. Of course, at the same time, one couldn't expect Microsoft to stay out of such a "convergence" market, so I'm not by any means saying that Xbox has been a mistake, either.

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