MorganX said:
>>How can you afford to break into the console arena if Microsoft already has shown that they're willing to spend billions to force competitors out of the market, and they already own half the decent game companies anyway?<<
How are they forcing competitors out of the business? By developing a better product? Well, welcome to America.
Half the best developers, please, Bungie has one excellent game....
That particular statement wasn't about now, it was about what the situation could theoretically be in a decade. One look at the PC industry, and you'll see something like the same picture. And my point stands; developing and promoting a competitive console is a very expensive proposition, costing literally billions of dollars. It takes a monumental company (Sony, MS) to cough up that kind of cash with the hopes of a payoff down the road. But the important difference is, if MS manages to kill off both Nintendo and Sony's consoles, the'll be no competition at all, and few if any companies in the world with both the financial wherewithall to attempt an inroad into a monopolized market (keep in mind that it's costing MS billions to break into a comeptitive market; the barrier is higher with a monopoly), and the confidence that they can effectively compete against a very rich monopolist that has in the past been willing to do whatever it takes (again, in this case could be buy up any game company in sight) to maintain its position.
As for the rest of your comments, you present a textbook case of the free-market capitalist's vision of commerece. Just about any economist will tell you that a monopoly is bad for a market, and MS is not only a bigtime monopoly trying to move into a new market, but one that has so far been largely unregulated and unrestricted (compared to, say, the breakup of the Bells or regulation of the electric industry).
And no, though Sony and Nintendo are huge companies, and any diversified company spreads its money around to try and leverage new businesses, none of those can do the sort of things MS can. Apple, even with iPod earnings, etc, isn't doing much more than breaking even, as is the case with most large corporations in competitive markets:
Apple posted profits of $60M or so on sales of $6.2 billion (less than 1% profit based on sales). Sony last year had about $63 billion gross income, with about $980M profit (1.6% profit). Nintendo did considerably better; $500M on gross of $4.2 billion (15%; clearly they're raking it in somewhere). Microsoft, in contrast, grossed $32 billion, and netted just shy of
$10 billion after taxes (that would be profits of 31% on sales). If they were in a functioning competitive market that benefitted anybody but the people who own their stock, those numbers would be much, much, lower, in line with the profit margins of just about any other normal corporation, because some competitor would be able to offer a comperable or superior product at a much lower price--something that doesn't happen with a monopoly.
If you honestly think that Microsoft got where it is by doing nothing more than making a better product than every other company on the market, and furthermore continues to do so today, there's really no point in arguing, and I have no idea what you're doning posting in a Macintosh-centric forum. Being an MS-hater isn't a prerequisite to being a Mac fan or posting here, but I find it honestly surprising that anyone could believe that Windows couldn't be either a significantly better or cheaper product if they were in a functioning competitive market or regulated like a monopoly should be.
Even with their profits from other divisions, Neither Sony nor Nintendo has anywhere near the cash to throw around that MS does; the losses that MS incurred on the Xbox last year alone were almost $1 billion; that would've driven Sony or Nintendo into the red (with no current hopes of profit at all--losses are accelerating), and it's unlikely either company could handle that sort of investment on a single product launch in a single area--certainly not for any extended period of time.
