The world’s largest software maker reported a slight drop in second-quarter financial results today (slow PC sales, competition from the Jesus phone, the Jesus tablet, etc.), but sales in its entertainment division, which makes those crazy Kinect sensors for Xbox, are going strong. Which means there’s tons more people gyrating their pelvises in front of the TV right now.

Also, Office 2010 haters, some people obviously loved the product, because at the Microsoft Business division, which makes most of its money from Microsoft Office, sales are up.

11 replies on “Kinect is Microsoft’s Latest Savior”

  3. I have no great love of Microsoft’s products, but given the alternatives it’s no surprise Office is still cleaning up. Google Docs is the perfect word processor for people who don’t mind waiting a second or two after every keystroke for their text to appear on screen.

  4. @3: Maybe if you have a shitty network connection.

    I think there are plenty of people who hate Office, but their employers bought the crap so they have to use it anyway.

  5. I was proven spectacularly wrong about the Kinect, which I thought would be a gigantic bomb like Zune and Bing — it was Microsoft playing 3 year late catch up to Wii, expensively, and yet it worked. I don’t know how they managed to pull it off in a recession, nor how many units they need to sell before they see any profit on the hardware, but their XBox division in general seems to have been a huge anomalous success, at least in the US.

  6. “it was Microsoft playing 3 year late catch up to Wii”

    Technically it was a 4 year catch up. Wii came out 11/06 and Kinect 12/10.

    Hard to believe the Wii will turn 5 years old this fall!

  7. @4

    Have you actually used Office 2010? It’s actually quite great and works much better than the whole iWork Suite. As for online document support, they also have Word, PowerPoint, and Excel all in free online working forms.

    Seattle’s hatred for MS and Amazon is so funny. Google is just as evil a MS and Amazon just isn’t evil period. Anyone that’s ever bought a book off of Amazon realizes that there are TONS of brick and mortar small scale bookstores using Amazon as their online storefront.

    Also, yes iPhone was revolutionary, but MS just sold over 2 million wp7’s since November. Survey shows 93% percent of users are very happy with the OS. just sayin’

  8. @7–I’ve used Office 2010 and, no, it’s not great. But it IS what my work bought. Many things are counter-intuitive and the Mac/PC versions are annoyingly different, and I really actually hate it. Sales are up because there’s essentially no competition in the business/academic market. In the 1990s, WordPerfect and others were serious competitors, but they were effectively killed off.

    I do like the Kinect, though.

  10. Office 2010 has been making money, yes, but (a) it’s expensive and (b) they could have been making EVEN MORE money on Office sales if the product had had even the slightest bit of interface backward-compatibility with Office 2003. But, no.

    2010 is fine if it’s your first word processor or if you weren’t a real power user of Office 2003. 2010 absolutely execrably sucks otherwise.

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