Verily I say unto thee, that Jerry McBride spake thusly:
> $17 billion cash? Didn't they once sit on a $60 billion cash reserve
> at one time? Wow, where did all the cash go?
Well they wasted $10B on Vis-duh (redesigning that "Start" button was
not easy!). Then there's all those Ferrari laptops they used to bribe
bloggers. Bribing the ISO committee couldn't have been cheap, nor the
daylight lobbery in Washington to fscking kill ODF. I hear they even
tried to buy Sweden, Nigeria and India - except the latter turned out
to be nothing more than payment for temporary accommodation for their
H-1B visa workers. Microsoft seem to buy countries as prolifically as
they buy companies these days. Greece and the UK are two more victims
that come to mind - with Sweaty's greasy palm lining Mr. Blair's back
pocket, although MS probably got that back from the MSBBC. Sabotaging
charities is also a crippling drain on resources, as they essentially
give away all those Windows licenses, to fscking kill the OLPC.
They must have blown quite a bit on S<0, not to mention all the shell
companies like Acacia, that they set up to troll Linux companies with
bogus patent claims. Their "viral marketing" (disease indoctrination)
campaigns, like that "People Ready" bullshit or their urban terrorism
against Sony (powerboat driveby), must've stung them quite a bit too.
And don't forget all the money they wasted on the (literally) flaming
eXb0rks, the ZZzzzzoon, Windows Live (a.k.a. Windows Undead), OneCare
(the reanimated corpse of GeCAD's RAV), and that ridiculous "Ribbon®"
redesign for MS Orifice.
Heck, the refill costs for Sweaty's grease-gun /alone/ must have cost
them a small fortune, as they squeezed every last copy of Vis-duh and
Orifice into their partner's channels.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
| make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
| - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
21:48:50 up 45 days, 19:24, 4 users, load average: 0.38, 0.25, 0.19
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