Not to mention the Xbox...;) That’s a huge market, they sell around 400,000 Xbox systems a month, leading the entire market.
They do a LOT of other hardware development as well, for other companies to put their labels on. Most of the telecom work I’ve done for Microsoft has worn the labels of other companies, not Microsoft. Microsoft develops the hardware (even the ASICs), the firmware, the ID, the entire system, pays to tool it, selects and qualifies the factory, then turns it over to another company to brand and sell. All using Microsoft OSes and connectivity.
Even though they’ll spend $10 million to make a phone system, they give it away to someone else, because they know - in the long run - they’ll make back ten times that amount in licensing and further lock themselves in as the standard for the industry.
Yep. I was trying to stick to "PC computer" hardware, since that appeared to be Rachel's original comment.
> Even though they’ll spend $10 million to make a phone system, they give it away to someone else, because they know - in the long run - they’ll make back ten times that amount in licensing and further lock themselves in as the standard for the industry.
I would venture to add that they also know that the "Microsoft" brand logo is a mixed blessing for certain products. There are the Microsoft fanboys who will buy anything with an MS or Windows logo on it (no different in that regard from Apple fanboys), but I daresay there are even more people who look at a Microsoft "Anything-Other-Than-Software" and their reaction is, "What the hell is Microsoft doing in this business???"
I suspect that plays into why MSFT often stays in the background...