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Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

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Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve installed Windows 10 Pro 1803 on two separate machines in the last month. Both with local accounts.

Could this be a Pro vs Home thing?

Nope, MS just uses some Dark Pattern (at least on home) to make it seem that way. The link to make a local account is not obvious.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#82
post #3

I'm puzzled why "Proven"s comment is dead? What they wrote seems accurate. There is no reason why this comment should be downvoted, and certainly no reason why the comment should be dead. This is what they wrote: Simply speaking they actually make more products people like to use. Google essentially has just one, and it’s based on diminishing user privacy to the maximum extent possible. MS collects user data but so d…

I hope you are aware you can vouch for dead comments?

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice is now an excellent alternative for both business and home use.

Is it really? I have occasionally tried open office and clones for a very long time and "adequate alternative" was the best impression I ever got and far from the worst.

Just to be clear, LibreOffice is not a clone of OpenOffice. It is OpenOffice -- the project was forced to change its name for legal reasons.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#84
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with most of your points, this one seems arguable: > Microsoft Excel remains the default lingua franca of business. Google Docs and Spreadsheets has not replaced Office. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have taken over the education market from elementary school through college, and for many businesses Google's offerings have become interchangeable with Microsoft's. Outlook and Excel still have a strong h…

LibreOffice is now an excellent alternative for both business and home use.

LibreOffice has never been an excellent alternative, IMO. It comes across as a mediocre port of a copy of Excel from 15 years ago.

Teaching users who are not great with computers and who know modern excel how to use some 1999-era LibreOffice Calc software is not fun. LibreOffice recreates the worst parts of menu/modal hell and it's not a place the modern user is good at navigating.

In every case I recommend Google Sheets over Calc these days. So much easier to teach, more intuitive design, and more simply interoperable with the outside world.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#85

I think most people really don’t understand the wide breadth and the real market of Microsoft as compared to other companies. Just look at these charts of income sources of each company: http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/cotd52602.png Google is literally just Ads whereas Microsoft is very evenly spread. If it lost one area itd be fine in the others. I think people have an exposure bias where they can onl…

HN in general has an info bubble problem, where it looks to them like Microsoft is dying because trendy Bay Area startups all use Slack and Google Docs. But in the rest of the industry, Microsoft is huge and, if anything, getting stronger over time and not weaker. Microsoft products that HN has never even heard of, like Dynamics and Host Integration Server, still make billions in revenue.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#86
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Google a little more credit. They have 7 separate products with over 1 billion users each [0]. Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Youtube and the Google Play Store. [0]: https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-...

The stock market doesn't care about users, it cares about profits. Android and Chrome and Google Play are unprofitable.

I believe the Oracle lawsuit showed that Android and Google Play are both quite profitable. Contrary to popular belief, Android is not free. You can download and install AOSP for free, but "full" Android including the Google apps, Google Play Services and the Google Play store cost real money. And Google has sold billions of those. They might not charge much, but when you multiply by a few billion it can still end up being a big number.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Play are unprofitable. ??? https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/05/app-revenue-climbed-35-per... $20B in revenue.

sales != revenue. with the 30% commission, it would be at most $6B. From http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/google-earnings/i... : > Alphabet posted nearly $15 billion in sales for the year from Google's "other revenues," which include cloud services and hardware products, like the Pixel phones and Google Home smart speakers.

Sales is, by definition, revenue. In this context, sales=revenue (although there is non-sales revenue, which is why the two words mean two different things).

I think you're getting at what is sometimes called "cost of revenue" and "net revenue" for businesses where it's important to report on sales channel costs.

Google doesn't break down the Play Store revenues this way, but for advertising there's a similar dynamic at play where it's "revenue" and "traffic acquisition costs"

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#88
Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet. Fixed that.

Alphabet includes Google but also all their other companies. I wonder how many of these included companies are not profitable entities at the moment but future investments and dragged Alphabet's value down a bit.

I don't know. I'm just sayin'.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#89
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market doesn't care about users, it cares about profits. Android and Chrome and Google Play are unprofitable.

It costs like ten dollars sometimes to rent a movie that probably costs them $0.30 to stream to me, they gotta be making some money

And how much does the studio charge to luscence the movie? Surely you didn't expect that was free?

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#90
I use only one product of Microsoft, Visual studio code But I use many products of Alphabet Inc , Google, (servers) Google docs, (servers) Google drive, (servers) Google keep, (servers) Gmail, (servers) Android, (client) Maps, (servers) YouTube, (servers) Tez, (servers) Play store, (servers) Google translate, (servers), ...

Many people don't realise it because almost all of them are available for free. Google products have very market.

Incase of Google, they have cost of maintenance almost for every product they develop.

But in case of Microsoft, they have less overhead.

Windows (client) Azure (servers) Xbox (client) Visual studio (client) Visual studio code (client) SQL (client) MS Office (client) ...

Microsoft also needs to push updates but, less than that of Google.

YouTube consumes too much of bandwidth, Same is the case with Play Store.

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