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Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

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Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#61
post #53

>The shares surged as much as 5.6 percent to a record $60.45. The last time Microsoft was trading near that level was in 1999. Using share price is suboptimal because the number of shares outstanding has decreased significantly since 1999. Better to use market cap (which is share price times the number of shares outstanding). (According to wikipedia) Microsoft reached a market cap of $618.9 billion in December 1999,…

You understand though that if MSFT had 100B USD in cash and spent it all in stock repurchase, then, in theory, its stock price wouldn't move but its market cap would go down by 100B. The market cap is not a perfect indicator of the value of a business either. If we start to nitpick, why not calculate share price in real dollar terms (take inflation into account), adjust for the average P/E ratio of US stocks, adjust…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#62
post #25

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensin…

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

Windows 10 seems to be degrading rather than getting better. It seems to have reached windows ME levels of stability on most of my devices. Leaving the win7/8 machines looking pretty good. The cool kids are always messing with it, so the stodgy maintenance programmers never get a couple years to fix all the crap they break.

Plus, the non stop UI "quirks" are probably worse than I can remember. The whole OS has turned into the windows file copy dialog. This is what I always hated about linux on the desktop, 1/3 of the crap doesn't work right..

For example, last night I was sitting in bed with my 9Y/O daughter when she pressed the battery saver icon on the tablet, and the estimated time dropped from 9 hours 31 mins to 8 hours 50 mins. To which I responded it seems like pressing the battery saver icon forced it to recompute the estimated time remaining, where before it had been showing a stale value. Pressing it on and off a couple more times we got it to shift up to 10 hours some minutes. Its like they can't smooth the power consumption for longer than a few seconds, and the recompute timeout is longer than the smoothing, so the value has large jumps instead of smoothing changing.

I could go on and on but its pretty obvious that no one is actually testing the UI, they are just letting some random people throw crap into it, and ship it. Worse its like their user metrics come down to, if less than 50% of the installs are using something then its ok to remove it (say classic mode).

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#63
post #25

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensin…

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

I'm in the opposite camp. I haven't had any problems with W10. It's an improvement from W8 and way faster than W7. The only thing that was annoying me was the updates, but I disabled those with a tool.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#64
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only service I have really seen being used is O365 emails. Rest of the Azure is not really being used by most of our customer. They are still dipping their toes in water so yeah it look like smoke and mirrors. At least in my anecdotal experience. Edit: I don't have an issue with down votes but seems like some people are angry. I just shared my experience.Can Microsoft show what is the revenue growth in absolute terms…

Virtualization is taking to the cloud in a big way this year and next. Most of my clients are pricing out between azure, aws, and local providers/partners for their cloud VM needs. Vmware just announced a deal with Amazon I believe and windows server 2016 comes with gobs of stuff that's pretty clearly meant for being hosted up on azure. It's not there yet for many since the WAN component is still too weak for many co…

Agreed Windows 2016 could be a game changer.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

Ah, to be young. Bad Desktops: Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows ME, Windows 3.1, O/S 2 Warp Good Desktops: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows NT

The difference is that those (well maybe not ME) got better as they aged due to bug fixes. 10, seems to create more bugs than it fixes with every update.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#66
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

Maybe you are the unlucky one. I wouldn't trade windows 10 for anything else.

Windows 10 is 90% great for me.

The 10% that annoys me is mostly around the way update works. If you have long running processes (like security camera DVR software, big render jobs, etc...) having the OS decide to reboot in the middle of the night is a bit of a headache. I know you can disable the update service, but it would be nice if they just put that in the windows update UI.

The other part that bugs me are the re-appearing bloatware apps like 3d builder, weather, contacts, xbox, groove music, etc.... The flipside of the reappearing apps issue is Microsoft uninstalling my VPN client. They don't think it's compatible with W10, but it works perfectly for me so I have to reinstall it every time.

To get back on topic though, Microsoft's Azure is fantastic. The earnings boost is well deserved.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#67
post #25

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensin…

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

I have worked mainly on OSX for my career, and recently had to switch to Windows for VR work. I started on Windows 7 and absolutely hated it. I hated the visual style of it, the awful UX of it, and just found it to be painful all-the-way-around. Sitting down at my desk in the morning, I'd almost always utter a small sigh of frustration just logging in.

When we finally got cleared by IT to go ahead with Windows 10 I was cautiously optimistic but after using it for a few months I was totally bought in. I will/would never go back to any pre-10 release.

I'm back on OSX now (new job) and still miss Windows 10 most days. I'm going to be building a personal machine soon, and unless the new MacBook Pro's can astound me it'll be a Windows 10 rig – no question.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#68
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only service I have really seen being used is O365 emails. Rest of the Azure is not really being used by most of our customer. They are still dipping their toes in water so yeah it look like smoke and mirrors. At least in my anecdotal experience. Edit: I don't have an issue with down votes but seems like some people are angry. I just shared my experience.Can Microsoft show what is the revenue growth in absolute terms…

IMO, Enterprise adoption of Azure is growing specially enterprises that rely on Microsoft stack exclusively. In last quarter, I personally suggested to few friends at Microsoft stack dependent companies to migrate to Azure instead of mucking around with colo hardware, VMware, VM management, licensing etc. for external facing services. It is a change for me. Previously I used to suggest moving to Linux/open source sta…

That may be true, but for large companies they changed the business model where large account resellers would bid under cost to sell EAs, etc.

They effectively raised the cost significantly for perpetual licensing/SA to push you into services agreements. Simultaneously, you get favorable terms (ie. anything other than MSRP) only if you commit long-term. Upon renewal they try to make you give up your right to transition back to perpetual licensing for Office.

So my bet is this is bullshit, shifting office dollars to O365, which include plans where you're just renting Excel.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#69
post #25

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensin…

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

The forced updates have really screwed with our CI process, as well. We have one choice of cloud provider for Windows 10 SKUs - Azure - and it's been brutal.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#70
post #57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understand though that if MSFT had 100B USD in cash and spent it all in stock repurchase, then, in theory, its stock price wouldn't move but its market cap would go down by 100B. The market cap is not a perfect indicator of the value of a business either. If we start to nitpick, why not calculate share price in real dollar terms (take inflation into account), adjust for the average P/E ratio of US stocks, adjust…

> if MSFT had 100B USD in cash and spent it all in stock repurchase, then, in theory, its stock price wouldn't move but its market cap would go down by 100B ? In the process of buying shares back, the market capitalization would increase due to the increase in share price. The share price would absolutely move. This is why companies have stock buy-backs, in order to pump up the share price. The 'buyback ratio' is the…

Sometimes people has some difficulty to understand than spending money in buybacks does reduce the market cap of a company, but I think is the first time I see someone argue that spending money in buybacks increases the market cap.
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