Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year

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31 pointsdsdirect22 comments

Pause for a moment to consider how much money that really is. How many people in our industry have put bread on their table with their piece of that massive pie.

That is, for example:

* About 19.33x bigger than the global music industry

* About 21.48x bigger than the global movie industry

* About 13.80x bigger than the global video game industry

* Nearly $100 from every man, woman and child alive today.

* About as big as the US Auto Industry (New Sales and Used Sales combined).

Just for reference, the IT industry revenues in 2010 were $1.5 trillion.

Most of these jobs and companies would still exist without Microsoft. They would just be using and/or building around someone else's software and/or platform.

I have to wonder how this compares to what many other companies would have made, had Microsoft not cut off their air supply.

Whatever it was, I expect it would have been unix underneath.

Or something more modern, like Plan 9. Let's not forget Unix is, however versatile, an old OS. I would prefer a very diverse ecosystem, with many competing OSs and architectures. Right now, it seems even more viable, with the popularity of web applications.

It's quite shameful we are still managing disks, files and programs...

Not necessarily. I say this because Microsoft and their ecosystem are exceedingly good at making money from selling software. If Microsoft didn't exist, the ecosystem might be built around many more fragmented platforms. They make $8.70 for every $1 that Microsoft makes; they might be making $100 dollars for every $1 in some parallel universe, and still making far less money (because their platforms will be making far less than Microsoft does in ours). And maybe people in that parallel universe don't pay for software; they only pay for support ;)

OTOH, paying less for software would allow that parallel universe to be even more efficient in their use of computers than we are on ours, spending less money and getting more done with it.

Plus, by not having "Wintel" they would be less constrained to innovate in hardware and software.

Shouldn't the valuation be some solid multiplier of the annual revenue of $580 billion?

The title should be:

Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year

Are they counting the spam zombie and phishing botnet industries into this number? Microsoft made them possible... A malware industry would have a hard time exploiting a diverse ecosystem like the one that existed prior to Microsoft's dominance. No single computing platform had the 90%+ share Microsoft has and writing multi-platform malware is hard. In fact, no single platform had more than 50%.

Apart from that, this is not even blogspam (submitted by a bot, or a very loyal, bordering obsessive, reader http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dsdirect) - the post itself is so small as to qualify it as a tweet. A tweet linking to a white paper sponsored by Microsoft that appears not to even be mentioned on IDC's website.

But you can download it from Microsoft Presspass, of course.

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDC...

edit: to all who say criticizing Microsoft brings good karma, this post serves as a warning. Burn, karma, burn.

I sure did not get what you were trying to convey here :(

> Are they counting the spam zombie and phishing botnet industries into this number? Microsoft made them possible...

Various malware infection modes were impossible (not really - it was just that nobody had been that stupid) before Microsoft invented ActiveX or started passing e-mail through script-enabled browser rendering engines. I remember making lots of e-mail virus jokes before Microsoft launched that Outlook 97 add-on (IIRC).

> A malware industry would have a hard time exploiting a diverse ecosystem like the one that existed prior to Microsoft's dominance. No single computing platform had the 90%+ share Microsoft has and writing multi-platform malware is hard. In fact, no single platform had more than 50%.

Malware economics are similar to off-the-shelf software - you target the largest base. Without a base large enough to provide for quick and constant reinfection, botnets would die quickly as its nodes are taken down or recovered. To survive in a fragmented ecosystem, malware would have to be cross platform and much more contagious and, therefore, harder to develop. If you make malware development too costly, malware developers will find some other criminal activity to do.

> Apart from that, this is not even blogspam (submitted by a bot, or a very loyal, bordering obsessive, reader http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dsdirect) - the post itself is so small as to qualify it as a tweet. A tweet linking to a white paper sponsored by Microsoft that appears not to even be mentioned on IDC's website.

The article is a single paragraph pointing to a PDF of a white paper sponsored by Microsoft downloaded from Microsoft's site that, surprisingly, shows Microsoft as the great benefactor of the market.

> But you can download it from Microsoft Presspass, of course.

> http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/mar11/03-24IDC....

These are self-explanatory.

> edit: to all who say criticizing Microsoft brings good karma, this post serves as a warning. Burn, karma, burn.

And so is this.

Whilst the figure is without doubt impressive, I can't help but wonder how much of this figure is money lost by the poor customers that bought costly, overly complex and hard to customise money-sinks that require specialists to beat into shape...

* cough *

SharePoint

Interesting. Has anyone seen similar results for other big companies (Apple & Google would be great). A quick google search didn't turn up anything.

Can't imagine either would be nearly as large, especially since Apple is relativity closed to other and I can't even think of companies that could be deemed as partners with Google.

Amazing how a company can be so interdependent with others all across the world.

I don't think Apple is as close as you may think initially. Steve Jobs announced during the iPad2 keynote that devs have earned over $2b from selling their apps on the App Store. Add to that all the artists and bands that succeed by selling their music on iTunes. Plus all the podcasters that wouldn't have been discovered if it wasn't for iTunes. Plus all the authors selling books on the iBookstore. Plus the hundreds of small and large companies making accessories, cases, adapters, covers, etc for iGadgets. Plus all the big brands like Bose creating iPod compatible hi-fi equipment. All the vehicles adding iPod dock support. Added up together, I'm not sure if it matches Microsoft's ecosystem, but Apple's is probably in the tens of billions of dollars.

I'd be interested to see SAP and Oracle. Haven't found anything either.

Am I the only one who is a little tired of the term "ecosystem" in the context of technology?

Portability and standards are difficult things to build, and they cost resources to develop, like anything else. Users don't understand the need for them and would happily jump in IE6, Windows, iPads or a similar 'ecosystems' until something bad happens and they see the open light (Firefox/Linux/Android). But sometimes no alternative exists (open systems are harder to monetize, and with fewer resources, they take longer to be built). So we're left with a lot of ecosystems where things just work and nothing 'bad' happened yet.

It's a difficult issue and I don't see it going away by itself anytime soon.

Android open? Like honeycomb?

If Google decides, next week, they will stop releasing any of their own source code (or whatever they borrowed from more-liberal-than-GPL licenses) you can always just fork whatever they already released. You the user - even if you also wrote the original code they based their product on - have no right to demand the release of what they built. They release if they want to.

Free Software is about that: it's about your freedom.

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