Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#131

Post by screye » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #62

jobu wrote: 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…

I agree with your comment but as it stands the business market is MUCH larger than the education market. Most schools don’t use either or don’t pay much. Schools are seen as essentially a small vertical in the extremely large market. Just think of all the companies who pay for 20,000 microsoft licenses. A lot of the market you describe is free.

The education market is a lot.more important than that .

Companies like Matlab, Autodesk prioritize getting young engineering students familiar with their products, so that the industry ends up adopting their products more willingly.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#132

Post by Nokinside » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

bfe wrote: post #65

I've really come to admire Satya Nadella as a great CEO.

Two large changes for better in Microsoft:

1. 2006 Bill Gates stepped down as a Chief Software Architect

2. 2014 Satya Nadella became CEO after Ballmer.

Gates was good CEO but he was not a good Chief Architect. He had the knowledge, the intelligence and skills, but he had no ability to do good high-level choices. Chief Architect needs to know when to sacrifice in details to get the whole slightly better.

Microsoft is not known for innovation,but they should have been able to do gradual refinement better under Gates. Microsoft was really starting to crumble under the completely unprincipled approach to large scale architecture.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#133

Post by beauzero » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #62

jobu wrote: 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…

I agree with your comment but as it stands the business market is MUCH larger than the education market. Most schools don’t use either or don’t pay much. Schools are seen as essentially a small vertical in the extremely large market. Just think of all the companies who pay for 20,000 microsoft licenses. A lot of the market you describe is free.

Just left a place with 17k+ G Suite accounts (K-12). They used free G Suite. Google is ingenious in how they are "certifying" educators on G Suite. The price for the tests are incredibly cheap State government is exactly the opposite. While not trivial standing up a shared AD tenet is easy/doable and gives you quick SSO in the cloud for .NET based web apps when everybody (logins) is on the tenet/AD. Quick being the keyword.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#134

Post by staplers » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #128

lalos wrote: post #114

As a long term investor, I'm worried with Google. All the bills are paid by ad revenue, a single horse. Then there is this bubble of claims that they have the best engineers and work environment yet this has not produced any other business equivalent to the ad business. Then they have a reputation of creating awesome tools that then get killed in years, enterprise customers don't like this unpredictability. Microsoft…

Ads are Google's business model, but they make their major money from a few different leading products : Search, ad platform(both internal and external), YouTube, Android.

All these Google platforms have lost my decade-long patronage recently due to inability to find what is needed (google thinks it knows me better than myself) and personal-info-commodification.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#135

Post by ernopp » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Combasems wrote: post #117

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly some investors don't believe in Google's moonshots.

So far have any worked out?

Gmail and Android can be considered moonshots, completely separate bets from the cash cow search product. They have both been enormously successful and been the starting point for new revenue lines (the whole GSuite for businesses, the Play Store)

Next moonshot which looks extremely promising is Waymo

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#136

Post by ernopp » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

oprah2018 wrote: post #125

bfe wrote: post #65

I've really come to admire Satya Nadella as a great CEO.

To really get my respect he needs to kill off ads in the Windows start menu and the pervasive Cortana surveillance. To really, REALLY get my respect: I would like to see Microsoft be a pure, best-practice software company. Do GREAT things independently of Windows. Make native Mac applications that are truly great. Make a better Mac application than Apple can. Make better iOS apps. Be a champion of Linux. and so on. S…

IMO: Outlook on iOS is a better email client than Apple Mail.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#137

Post by nostrademons » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

lalos wrote: post #114

As a long term investor, I'm worried with Google. All the bills are paid by ad revenue, a single horse. Then there is this bubble of claims that they have the best engineers and work environment yet this has not produced any other business equivalent to the ad business. Then they have a reputation of creating awesome tools that then get killed in years, enterprise customers don't like this unpredictability. Microsoft…

Google's "other revenues" (mostly Cloud and Play) was $14B as of their last 10-K, growing at 40% YoY. That pales in comparison to their advertising revenues, but if you just had an isolated business (not part of Alphabet) with $14B in revenue growing 40%/year, that would be a pretty attractive stock.

(For comparison, HP Enterprise has about $28B in revenue with negative growth and is worth $23B. At current growth rates, Alphabet's Cloud segment will surpass HP in revenue in 2-3 years.)

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#138

Post by cwyers » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

stvswn wrote: post #87

eddieplan9 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Play Store sales != Google Revenue. Google gets a 30% cut, the rest goes to the app developer.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#139

Post by derptech » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

lalos wrote: post #114

As a long term investor, I'm worried with Google. All the bills are paid by ad revenue, a single horse. Then there is this bubble of claims that they have the best engineers and work environment yet this has not produced any other business equivalent to the ad business. Then they have a reputation of creating awesome tools that then get killed in years, enterprise customers don't like this unpredictability. Microsoft…

Uh, corporate gmail? They have to be making non-ad money off corporate Gsuite products (gmail, calendar, drive:docs/sheets/slides).

I've been at companies that have used other forms of internal corporate email, and all of them are worse. Open source/roll-your-own, On-prem Exchange, Cloud-based Office365, what have you... all of them suck.

Re: Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

#140

Post by hermitdev » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

goalieca wrote: post #20

paulie_a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While anecdotal, I only know one person that still uses Microsoft office, and that is just for Excel. Everyone else is libre office or Google docs. I grew up on office but once they introduced that stupid ribbon menu I ditched it. Apparently I was not the only one.

The ribbon menu is quite excellent and makes office usable again. I know so many people that use office, it's also the standard suite in my workplace and probably most others that aren't startups. I much prefer latex and git for doing editing but word is quite functional.

The ribbon menu introduces problematic issues in newer versions of Office for add-ins. Add-ins can't effectively update controls for non-active windows via the COM interface. For instance, if you have a text-box within an add-in Ribbon menu, a non-active window will not display the appropriate text for that window.

Well, to be honest - it's not exactly a Ribbon issue. It's an issue with Ribbon moving to an SDI interface with Office 2010. Office 2007 worked fine, 2010 and later bomb with the aforementioned issue (at least as far as Office 2013 - last I worked on Office Add-ins).