In the earliest days, Gates and the others developed a Basic language compiler (Basic language is the best language in the world *^_^*), which was charged and used to make money. As a result, some users even found their source code from a computer box. . . Of course I can’t sell it for money (If I remember wrong, please correct me, I kind of forgot whether it was Basic or the earliest DOS).
Later, Microsoft established cooperation with IBM on DOS and could make money from software licensing, and Microsoft started to rise a little bit (Gates’ family was already familiar with IBM executives, this is the real world). Then Windows 95 started, which was a new milestone.
Looking at Microsoft’s current income, you will find that Windows’ income is still relatively large. Piracy means a lot to Microsoft, I will talk about it later.
“Microsoft released its fourth fiscal quarter report as of June 30, 2020. The financial report shows that Microsoft’s fourth fiscal quarter revenue was US$38.033 billion, an increase of 13% from US$33.717 billion in the same period last year; net profit was US$11.202 billion. Compared with the same period last year’s 13.187 billion US dollars down 15%, the diluted earnings per share was 1.46 US dollars, less than the same period last year.”
Office and other businesses related to productivity and business processes contributed $11.75 billion this quarter. The cloud service business contributed USD 13.37 billion. “Microsoft’s commercial cloud business, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and other cloud services, has annual revenue exceeding US$50 billion for the first time this year.” Local Office plus Office cloud services, the total amount of revenue contributed by the Office business is very large.
“The quarterly revenue of the personal computer division closest to consumers was US$12.91 billion, higher than market expectations. This division includes hardware devices and content services such as Windows, Surface, and Xbox. Among them, or affected by the epidemic, Xbox content and services Revenue increased by 65% year-on-year.”
The first three paragraphs were written when I answered another question.
The Microsoft Windows model has naturally become a charging + piracy model. In fact, it is a bit like today’s various free Internet services, with corresponding monetization methods behind them. Assuming that there are no pirated users and everyone is a paying user, then Microsoft’s revenue will be amazing. Even today, Windows revenue is still a lot of Microsoft’s revenue.
In this case, you said that there are many pirated users, so just open source. So what is the business model after open source?
If Microsoft can make more money after open-source, or if the security barrier is higher, then they will have the incentive to open-source, otherwise, it will not.
When we are making a product, in addition to the product itself, we must also consider the commercial closed-loop behind it. Where does the money come from, how to collect it, and how to close the loop?
If you only see that there are much piracy, you think that Windows should be open source. This is actually not enough depth of thinking and not looking at the problem in a larger system.
This is the way product managers think.
Whether it is open source or not is not just a technical issue. In the final analysis, it is the niche in the business world.
Recently, I started to try to use video to output content, and I have already turned some of the tens of thousands of replies previously answered into videos. Invite everyone to pay attention at station B: “Horsepower is to know the group”
Irrelevant to the content of the article:
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