In recent weeks I’ve been spending quite a bit of time talking to journalists and analysts about the issues around office-document XML file formats in general, and the Massachusetts dust-up in particular. There’s one exchange that pops up in almost every one of these conversations, and it goes something like this. Journo: “Now, you guys are taking all these idealistic high-minded positions, but you know and I know that what we have here is a battle for market share.” Tim: “That’s part of it, but we think that our interests, and the customers’, are both best-served when there’s no file-format lock-in and there’s a wide-open competitive market.” Now it’s not entirely about business, because governments have policy objectives, for example transparency and freedom of information, that aren’t directly business-related. But indeed, there is a dollars-and-cents business dimension. And to help broaden the knowledge of those dollars and cents, I went and checked Microsoft’s Investor Relations page to look up the Office-related numbers. In the fiscal year that ended July 1st, they reported profit of $7.915B on $11.013B in revenue. The trend continues: in the most recent quarter (ending last September), it was $1.934B on $2.675B. Just FYI.
