They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.

Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.

Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.

> They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers

That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.

Microsoft has _nothing_ like the debt load that Oracle does.