[1] http://www.windowscentral.com/more-details-emerge-how-xiaomi...
Microsoft makes money through their enterprise lines that Apple and Google wish they could get their hands on.
For example, you can license Windows desktop OS by named user or by machine. If you do it by machine, it's cheaper, but if you do it by named user then that user can utilize the license on up to 5 (I think) devices (PCs, tablets, phones, whatever). Generally speaking, licenses by machine are called CALs (client access licenses), and the way you get to a number is by running a report in Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (MS SCCM), which is a server platform that helps you manage and distribute software to machines attached to your Active Directory domain(s). However, there is another option for desktop licensing: desktop virtualization using Microsoft Remote Desktop running on a server or VM. In this case, you have to pay for RDP CALs, which cost about 3x what a desktop "Core" CAL does. If you're running Terminal Server (for the RDP clients to access), you have to license that (the server OS + Terminal Server itself) ... however, you can reduce the Server OS license by also licensing Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which lets you pay once per Virtual Host and lets you spin up as many Windows Server VMs on that host as you want.
Anyway, counting all this and figuring out the contract amount is done using these SCCM reports, plus a bunch of manually counted stuff plugged into a complicated Excel workbook with many tabs, formulae and hidden VBA ... and then you start the person-to-person negotiations with Microsoft, because depending whether you're a category A, B, or C enterprise you get different pricing, and you can be in different categories for different products or product lines.
I'd say that each time we have to do a true-up it consumes about 1000 person hours.
(Sorry, my definition of those suffixes has been forever muddled by working in finance :( )
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...
Sure. But to be fair, Microsoft's four decades of returning non stop profits is more remarkable than Apple's relatively recent success and it's chequered record overall. No technology company is likely to wield the kind of power that Microsoft had in the 90's. So the advantage in doing software or the entire stack is very time period sensitive.
I think Microsoft cash cow is their Office Suite. To run that suite you still need a Microsoft OS and recently their Office 365 cloud version is also showing strong growth.
This only bites you occasionally, but when you are a spreadsheet driven org (e.g. Finance groups in a company) you often need the performance/top-end feature set of Excel for Windows.
Not to mention their Office 365, MSDN, etc lines that are mad profitable.
1) Apple makes a fraction of its revenue from the app store, about 8%. And they're considered one of the two, if not the most, successful app store on the planet.
2) PCs, as opposed to mobile platforms, are open systems with a radically different distribution culture. You visit a website, click a button to launch an installer, choose a directory and go. Yes, the customer would prefer an app store, but giving MS a 30% cut when you drive all the traffic and marketing and downloads on your websites anyway? Unlikely. On Mobile there's not much of a choice.
It's obvious that a windows store will generate revenues and would be a good move. Mac and Linux have em, and if well executed on the biggest PC/Laptop platform in the world, then it can be a big deal. Just look at Steam, somehow it drives so many eyeballs that publishers are willing to give a cut to Steam to do something they're already doing themselves on their own website easily: distribution.
But steam being the favorite by far, still makes between 1 and 2 billion dollars in revenue.
In short it's pretty unlikely to see MS really thrive on app store revenue. It'll be a decent product, but it's probably more for improving the customer experience (through a properly curated store) and get people to like Windows again than to make a ton of money. For MS it seems it's still all about selling licenses to vendors, office and enterprise/education. It's kind of funny how extremely non B2C it is, and how B2B focused it really is, for a company that builds products used by billions of people. I think these latest moves have kind of shown MS understands that and is trying to get closer to (dealing with) the customer: build their own hardware, make their software free.
Combined with their Azure services, they've developed several other valuable streams of revenue. Probably enough where they can give away their OS for free in order to gateway these users onto their other products and services. This is a classic business move, the same thing Apple has done for years with its products.
Granted, they're not the biggest, but they are starting to put a dent in Amazon's market:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608726/cloud-computing/clo...
"Our commercial cloud revenue grew 147 percent this quarter, driven by both Office 365 and Azure. Our commercial cloud annual revenue run rate more than doubled this year and now exceeds $4.4 billion and with this rapidly growing scale we continue to expand our cloud gross margins."
They are also giving away visual studio now which is part of >1bn$ development business division