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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#41

Post by johnsea »

spectramax wrote: post #11

It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry…

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data...

Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware.

Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessarily lead to actions (read: payments).

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#42

Post by bgorman »

loudmax wrote: post #32

Microsoft's core revenue is still due to market lock-in of their proprietary technologies: MS Office and Windows itself. There are other office suites out there, but nothing can gain much market share without complete compatibility for MS Office file formats: docx, pptx, etc. Microsoft produced a version of Office for Macs and that allowed Apple to grow greater than niche, but their market share was always tiny compa…

G Suite, WPS Office, WordPerfect

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#43

Post by dragonwriter »

cheeze wrote: post #18
thrower123 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible, but from the inside as a Microsoft Partner, it feels like most of the world is just starting to move to the cloud, and when they do, they go Azure, because they are already dependent on Exchange.

If you're already locked into msft, then yeah msft makes sense. But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else. This matters to most companies. Also, Azure is a pretty miserable dev experience for many of their services. Many of AWS smaller services aren't great, but better from what I've used/general sentiment.

> But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else.

GCP is, AFAIK, usually cheaper; but AWS is more established, and the “no one ever got fired for being buying...” player of public cloud (which has to chafe MSFT, since they pretty much displaced IBM in that role for on-prem.)

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#44

Post by exelius »

spectramax wrote: post #11

It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry…

Yeah, Apple had the foresight to see the next big thing in tech was going to be privacy. But I think it’s reflective of a larger societal problem: we don’t know who to trust anymore. It seems like every company is trying to scam its users, so Apple is betting that there is a valuable segment of the market willing to pay a premium to do business with a brand that has no ulterior motives past selling you a device at a high markup, and maybe some value-add services.

To be fair, this has always been a problem — I think the recent failings of the historical trust model are due to better information rather than any increase in exploitative behavior. But prior to the smartphone era, trust was a fuzzy, emotional problem where a customer’s trust in a brand could be influenced by marketing alone. Today it is an explicit, quantifiable problem where users are willing to vote with their feet.

What companies are we bestowing authority upon? Do those companies’ business models truly have our best interests at heart? What guarantees do users have that their trust won’t be violated? I firmly believe that whoever can solve these questions to the market’s satisfaction will own the future.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#45

Post by kuzehanka »

johnsea wrote: post #41
spectramax wrote: post #11

It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry…

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data.

This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#46

Post by spectramax »

rdslw wrote: post #38

As an investor I bought few years ago MSFT stock. I did it as I saw two things: 1. azure 2. o365 1. because I knew what happened (and was happening) with AWS 2. because microsoft moved to subscription model Those two things, connected with third "secret" incredient: BIGGEST user base (corporate) which WILL use those two offerings = success. Satya is/may be great. I bought stock around 2014/2015 because of the above a…

I think your reasoning is a perfect example of Confirmation bias, I do agree with your points but there is no way to analyze this objectively - market is a complex system with game theory and all kinds of players doing unpredictable things, disasters such as password leaks, etc. If results were the opposite, one can come up with various other reasons to explain their losses.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#47

Post by thrower123 »

cheeze wrote: post #18
thrower123 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible, but from the inside as a Microsoft Partner, it feels like most of the world is just starting to move to the cloud, and when they do, they go Azure, because they are already dependent on Exchange.

If you're already locked into msft, then yeah msft makes sense. But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else. This matters to most companies. Also, Azure is a pretty miserable dev experience for many of their services. Many of AWS smaller services aren't great, but better from what I've used/general sentiment.

The thing there is that almost everyone is already dependent on Office. Breaking that is nearly impossible.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#48

Post by baybal2 »

I'm failing to see what has changed.

Point is that they still make the lion share of their revenue from milking PC OEMs and plumpy corporate clients.

The fact that they changed tools for doing so, does not change the scheme at large.

Their hosting service Azure just took over their AD and sharepoint clients with some extra being the genuine new clientele

I'd say that under Nadella, they grew even more recalcitrant, and dependent on their main revenue sources.

Ever got a visit from an MS salesperson recently? One that came to us to do AD was almost begging us to switch to AD on Azure.

I'd also say that MS became a little bit akin google in that their new product efforts fall into unending cycles of rebrandings, and half-hearted restarts. A lot of oldtimer MS devs I knew say that now they got a genuine fear of every new tech coming from MS almost customarily becoming an abandonware in 2-3 years term.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#49

Post by tabs_masterrace »

maxxxxx wrote: post #19
1024core wrote: post #2

Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned it around. Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.

In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR. Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearte…

Windows always been a pain to develop for. And every Windows version redundantly includes "a new api for everything" alongside all the horrible legacy stuff.

But Microsoft's recent efforts on Linux & macOS, i.e. VSCode, has been surprisingly good. They do a lot of things, I think Typescript is run by MS as well.

So that's something that positively changed under Nadella.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#50

Post by tabtab »

johnsea wrote: post #41
spectramax wrote: post #11

It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry…

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…

Re: Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee.

This could fuel class complaints that the poor will be snooped on more than the rich.

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