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Re:The Deal That Makes No Sense by jyrkesh on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @04:59PM (#6323705)
I don't think it's "pure market BS". Microsoft has "total cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments standing at $77.02 billion as of June 30."[1] For a company that's still in the black, that's a pretty long runway.

And I have trouble understanding why the NSA stuff is relevant here. Believe me, I'm as upset as anyone here about it, but I really don't think that Microsoft is propped as a company by some cash that the NSA gave them to build out some relatively trivial monitoring infrastructure.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/03/a-trojan-horse-once-again-s...

Re:The Deal That Makes No Sense by windexh8er on Friday September 06, 2013 @10:42AM (#6340669)
I think the recent revelations reveal my point re: NSA. A significant amount of that NSA budget is being used to buy into product steering and development. This was rather obvious as details started coming to light. I never said Microsoft was "propped", but that is artificially stimulating a company based on a flawed reality of market and investment (i.e. consumers are not buying a product to increase this margin - and in fact these funds are making the product less viable from the consumer standpoint).