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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

#81

Post by criddell »

StillBored wrote: post #62
mattnewton wrote: post #35

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…

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…

According to Reddit, Microsoft laid off all their QA people in November of 2014:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...

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

#82

Post by bitmapbrother »

jerf wrote: post #73
tim333 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg's position was "No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous." Which I think remains largely true?

The only company that leaps to mind that acts like they are actively afraid of Microsoft is Valve. It's the only explanation for keeping the SteamOS alive I can think of (and developing it in the first place, for that matter), and the way it has neither been shut down, nor really given the push it needs to succeed. It's insurance, and as long as it's a half-viable insurance policy, it's doing its job. Everywhere else…

Valve isn't afraid of Microsoft, they're just critical of their motives. Steam will always be the destination for digital PC games and there's nothing Microsoft can ever do to change that. Everytime Microsoft has tried to challenge Steam they've failed spectacularly. Microsoft and PC gaming just don't go together.

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

#84

Post by FT_intern »

hbosch wrote: post #67
mattnewton wrote: post #35

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…

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 w…

>I was totally bought in.

why?

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

#85

Post by mtgx »

mattnewton wrote: post #35
Bud wrote: 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…

Their Q&A for Windows also seems to have taken a big dive, despite all the feedback Microsoft is getting now with the permanent "preview" version of Windows 10 - or perhaps because of it, as a way for Nadella to cut costs with Q&A.

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

#86

Post by mtgx »

criddell wrote: post #66
elcct wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I know you can disable the update service

No, you can't in Windows 10.

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

#87

Post by vgt »

treebeard901 wrote: post #49
FUCK__GOOGLE wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Azure thus far has been not so great. Everything mostly works but the portal is just so painfully slow and difficult to coax along. Kind of doubt they will see the sort of exciting growth that AWS has seen, so yeah looking at accounting details would be key here.

> My experience with Azure thus far has been not so great. Have you tried the Google Cloud Platform?

Judging by his username, I wouldn't bet on it:)

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

#88

Post by sfaf »

samfisher83 wrote: post #3

If you look at the numbers their cash over the past few years have been relatively stable about ~24 billion in FCF. Now if we model that as a Perpetuity with 10% rate which has been historical rate of the market we get 24/.1=240 (not including inflation) if we add Net Tang Assets and some tax benefits if we write down goodwill we we end up with 56billion. However MSFT is trading for 450 billion. Where is this extra 1…

10% is not the normal discount rate for most people. I don't know what assets you are buying into but most assume a 5-7% discount rate because thats what most expect the long term growth of a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.

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

#89

Post by kgwgk »

rifung wrote: post #77
arcanus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This is why companies have stock buy-backs, in order to pump up the share price. Why does this matter to them? Stocks are very strange to me.. when I think of owning a business, I'd hope to get some share of the profits, which as I understand it, is dividends for stocks. This being the case, I always thought stock buybacks were a long term investment in the sense that the company would pay more upfront so they'd ha…

About the last question, all of the reasons you mention are valid (also management compensation is sometimes linked to share price).

Dividends and buybacks are essentially interchangeable as far as the shareholders are concerned. Simplifying a bit (ignoring taxes, transaction costs, discount on cash on the balance sheet, etc.), if you own 10% of a company valued at $100mn (i.e. you have $10mn in shares) and the company has $10mn in cash that it wants to return to shareholders it can either distribute dividends (so you get $1mn in cash and your shares are now worth 10% of $90mn) or it can buy back 10% of the outstanding shares. You could sell all your shares (you get $10mn in cash), keep all your shares (now they are worth 11.11% of $90mn, i.e. $10mn) or sell part of your holdings (and hopefully you'll believe me if I tell you that the stocks you keep plus the cash you get will make $10mn in total).

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

#90

Post by WalterBright »

hollerith wrote: post #38

>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,…

Consider that Microsoft started paying dividends after 2000, a yield of about 2.5%. A rough calculation of that compounding for 16 years is 150%.
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