Microsoft decoded...

So what does Microsoft (M$ from now on .. or should it be M$$ .. M$^$?) do? I am (was) fairly certain that it is an O/S company that also makes a nice Office suite. Then again, maybe they are a Music company .... scratch that -- I mean they are an Internet portal, nah .. they are a search company.

Just off the top of my head M$^$ are into .. an O/S, Office suite, E-Mail, Internet search, Mobile phone software, iPod killers (yup that one has been announced), Firefox killers (IE8?), PS2 killers, Gameboy killers (I'm sure that is next), Input devices, Web cams and that list keeps getting longer and weirder each day. Add to this the fact that they also want to compete with (or kill off) Oracle, SAP, IBM, Google.....

The rationalists/analysts will offer silly (logical) explanations like "M$$ has forgotten what it is that they do". Baa-humm-bug, my 'conspiracy theoritical explanation' is that they are not really a software company at all ... M$ is in fact a large charity focused on helping out C/C++ programmers.

huh? Well, think about it ... they employ about 60,000 developers. They lose money on just about product-line except Office and Windows. Given that about 10,000 developers are working on these two product-lines. They effectively are looking after 50K C/C++ developers. There you go ... this is the truthiness behind the world of Microsoft.

-- Rajesh