http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2125544,00.asp - there you go.
It’ll take ages for that thing to actually be really profitable. Because, you know, that would be 1-2 positive quarters vs. all the negative quarters/years they’ve had ever since they started developing the very first Xbox.
-Julian
Almost a year old originally, but maybe the news has actually lapped itself and become fresh again. I guess it’s somewhat newsworthy that they haven’t delayed their profitability projections again.
Wasn’t the Xbox always supposed to be profitable “next year” for any given year?
All he’s talking about is profitable for a given period. I don’t think he said “2008 calendar year”, just “next year”. It could be FY 2008 (which I think would end June 30, 2008 for MST), which I don’t suppose is all that hard to believe because he’s talking about the whole package of console/games/Live/peripherals and Halo 3 will launch in that window. It wouldn’t shock me to find out that the console is break-even for much of the July 1 '07-June 30 '08 period, which means there’s not much to drag on profits.
He also made the point that they look at the P&L picture from a “system life” point of view (which is basically the same point JD made, except that the MSFT guy might be looking at the 360 as a seperate thing from the Xbox1).
So, not really big news, I guess.
A graph showing how much profit Microsoft would have made just shoving the same money they spent on XBox 1 / 360 into Treasury Bonds would be very interesting…
Especially when compared with how much money they actually made :-)