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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

In fact if I was MSFT and you gave me $25.82 (current stock price) I'd give you back $0.64 a year and a share of my stock (current dividend price).

And in fact, they've made that sale 8,650,000,000 times so far (current outstanding shares).

http://www.dividend.com/dividend-stocks/technology/applicati...

EDIT -> You're ignoring that the division DOUBLED profits over the last year, what if they maintain that growth rate?

Or 1/4 of that growth rate?

Either way YES, that's a solid return on investment.

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"what if they maintain that growth rate?"

That's a terrible argument structure. You might as well cut straight to "What if we just assume I'm right?" and be more honest about it.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/23/xbox-division-posts-165-mi... says $165 million in profits on $1,670 million (1.67 billion) in revenue for the division. Saying "doubled their profits" sounds impressive, but it's not sustainable; say rather instead "increased their quarterly revenue by 5%" (or so, give or take a bit depending on the real numbers) for a better view of what that really represents. Still nothing to sneeze at (I'd take it), but not the same picture at all.

Yeah, but the entire linked post is making the same kinds of assumptions about general trends in hardware. Now, those assumption might be stronger than these (I happen to think they are), but its logic really isn't terribly better than this.

I honestly look quite fondly on trending, and yes, xbox is trending in the right direction. But I still think calling it "wildly profitable" is silly.

Having conceded that its trending positively, in this specific business, you're only as good as your last console. Nintendo is probably the only company that can lean heavily on its brand to get it through a poor hardware iteration (its brand and its so-far good-as-gold portable product).

Keep in mind Nintendo is the only gaming company that sells hardware that turns a profit (Sony and MS lose money on console sales, or at least did on launch) and is actively trying to grow the market (and depending on who you believe, doing an incredible job of it)

The mere fact that both Sony and MS now sell hardware that imitates the Wii's functionality should tell you this isn't a poor hardware iteration.

I think Sony still sells the PS2 in several markets. That must offset some of the subsidies on the PS3

I wasn't talking about the Wii.

Video games platforms are a cyclic industry. It's unprofitable during the first few years when they launch their new system then it becomes a cash cow when hardware gets cheaper to produce and they don't have to spend too much yet to launch the next generation.

I believe that overall, Xbox will be profitable for Microsoft, it gives them a foot in the user's living room and could be used to stream content onto their TV. But wildly profitable ? Probably not. You've got to be Nintendo to do that : sell your hardware with a good margin from day one and sell millions of every Mario/Zelda game that you release.

Nintendo is king because they build the hardware, sell the software and have the vision thanks to Miyamoto. It's really the Apple of video games.

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