IBM has a lot of sub-industry sectors to fall back on if one areas gets hurt. What would happen (heaven forbid that it ever would for the sake of all the MSFT investors) if MSFT's msrketshare in the software arena were to collapse because of one of many reasons? MSFT woudl be in deep kaka! What percentage of MSFT's revenue is made up of software revenue (70% - 80% - 905)? Name one sub-industry within IBM that makes up any more than 30% of their business?
Oh, my. The way you group everything MSFT does as "the software business" a perfectly valid answer to your IBM question would be "the hardware business."
Are you talking about MSFT OS business, their entertainment SW business, their Internet SW business, their educational SW business, their Office application SW business, their non-Office application business, or what?
Toy, have you noticed how that now that there's a standard OS for hand-held and palm computers, Windows CE, that there are light versions of popular software programs becoming available for them? Like Quicken? Too bad for the Palm Pilot, I guess, as it finds it's niche as the next MacIntosh. At least it'll stay popular with the Microsoft haters. Good for MSFT shareholders as this will be a very quickly growing market for several years. These suckers will eventually become as common as cell phones if not pagers. Of course, since it will increase the percentage of MSFT's "software business" you'll probably try to spin it as a negative. |
