The "Windows monopoly+Office monopoly=Microsoft" story was absolutely true 10 years ago, but less so now.
1. It looks as if the "Office" revenue figures are coming from MSFT's reported revenues in the Business segment. That's not all Office. Based on what they've said at the last few Financial Analyst Meetings, Exchange is approaching $2B/year, SharePoint is about $1B/year, and Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) is more than $1B per year. I also know that Project has been a $1B/year business for a long time (believe it or not), and products such as Comms Server and Visio contribute around $500m/year. Margins on all these products are lower than on Office, but most (not Comms Server) are profitable.
2. In addition to all the non-Office products that compose its Business segment as mentioned above, the Server and Tools business (Windows Server, SQL Server) is profitable (30% margins) and growing revenues average of 15% for the last six years. Not monopoly, but a good business.
Look at all these stats together, and seems like they should get out of search and advertising and sell off (or scale back to maintenance mode) most of the consumer online sites, focusing instead on hosted business apps--they're already doing it with Exchange and SharePoint, why not Office? If somebody's going to canniblize their "real" business, it might as well be them.
Paul Merrell on 17 May 08"Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted unanimously to formally propose using new technology to get important information to investors faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. At the center of the SEC proposal is "interactive data" - computer "tags" similar in function to bar codes used to identify groceries and shipped packages. The interactive data tags uniquely identify individual items in a company's financial statement so they can be easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases, and put to any number of other comparative and analytical uses by investors, analysts, and journalists. The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to provide financial information using interactive data beginning next year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public companies." Note that reports must currently be submitted in the Edgar format, with WordPerfect the only major word processor writing directly to Edgar. See also http://www.xbrl.org/faq.aspx (.) The proposal is potentially susceptible to legal challenge at the WTO per terms of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agrement on Government Procurement. If approved, XBRL would constitute a "technical regulation" within the meaning of the ATBT and a "technical specification" within the meaning of the AGP. That raises the issue of whether XBRL constitutes an unnecessary obstacle to international trade within the meaning of those treaties. This is the kind of stuff that is supposed to get sorted out by joint creation of an international standard by ATBT member nations. But both treaties are very poorly implemented in the U.S.
