Microsoft's Spending Spree (Continued)
Everyone else does. Here are some details.
The company plans to cough up $1 billion to bolster MSN in its epic battle vs. Google and Yahoo. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined those plans today at the company's MSN strategy event.
Besides that, the company plans a huge marketing push for Vista and Office 2007 next year. But $2.4 billion—which is what Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund estimates has been snarfed from next year's bottom line, would cover an awful lotta swag.
Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell acknowledged that for the rest of this year, the company is prepared to plow profits back into Xbox 360 to make hay while Sony suffers PlayStation delays.
What's happening is a massive data center arms race with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo all ramping up their infrastructure spending.
Yahoo and Microsoft are both building out huge data centers among the farm fields of central Washington, close to the Columbia River, fount of hydro-electric power . Microsoft insiders say the company already has prodigious hosting power in its Tukwila data center, but you know what they say: More is more.
And, when it comes to hosted SharePoint, which is basically what Office Live is, more may not be enough. SharePoint is a storage hog. Storage is cheap, but free it's not.
Also for a little non-industry related hilarity, check out this video. (It's clean, promise!)