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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

#261

Post by Rotareti »

manigandham wrote: post #260
sha666sum wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when Microsoft does FOSS, they do it in a way that has "proprietary" written all over it. I'm quite excited about writing C# on Linux, but slapping a MIT license on code you release is only half the deal. Yesterday I decided to write some C# code on Linux. That's easy, I thought: VSCode and .NET Core can both be found in Arch's repos these days. I just have to set an environment variable and edit VSCode's settin…

VSCode and Visual Studio Code are the same thing, so what do you mean? Are you saying the repo is not providing the actual VSCode?

The arch linux package registry has a version of VSCode available, that is build without MS telemetry/branding. I guess that's what parent is using.

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

#262

Post by sonnyblarney »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #206
scarface74 wrote: post #148

Microsoft’s “performance” wasn’t bad by any objective metric during the Ballmer era. If the stock market were rational, MS stock would have been doing a lot better under Balmer than it did. But then again, if the stock market were rational, Lyft would have never been able to go public and Tesla would basically be worthless.

MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze. Shareholders tend to look forward rather than backward and it was getting very clear that windows and office were increasingly…

"MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze."

No, this is not fair.

Ballmer reconfigured sales channels, created an array of Enterprise offers including cloud - that's what enabled him to grow MS substantially during those years.

"Office is now liberated from Windows and making a lot of money for MS again. " - it always was.

The 'windows everything' strategy makes sense in the 2000's. iOS is pretty similar to MacOS - it worked for Apple. It even made sense early on in cloud.

Satya is the right choice for the right time, and it was right in hindsight to go cloud-linux and other things ...

But there's too much 'narrative' around this Satya thing.

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

#263

Post by sonnyblarney »

hangonhn wrote: post #154
scarface74 wrote: post #148

Microsoft’s “performance” wasn’t bad by any objective metric during the Ballmer era. If the stock market were rational, MS stock would have been doing a lot better under Balmer than it did. But then again, if the stock market were rational, Lyft would have never been able to go public and Tesla would basically be worthless.

Hang on. Stock market price is suppose to price in future earnings too. So, the price is always to some extend speculative and may look quite divorced from present circumstances. So, if during the Balmer era the price was depressed, it reflects the negative predicted outcome for Microsoft and if it is a bit lofty, it reflects expectations of better days to come for MSFT.

Future earnings are difficult to predict, so they factor in the warm fuzzy things that the CEO talks about, and how much 'confidence' they have in them.

Also - times change. In the 2000's people just thought MS was 'old'. Now they are realizing there's some life in the beast.

Satya deserves a lot of credit, nothing bad to say - but in hindsight it also seems as if MSFT was under priced.

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

#264

Post by type0 »

manigandham wrote: post #260
sha666sum wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when Microsoft does FOSS, they do it in a way that has "proprietary" written all over it. I'm quite excited about writing C# on Linux, but slapping a MIT license on code you release is only half the deal. Yesterday I decided to write some C# code on Linux. That's easy, I thought: VSCode and .NET Core can both be found in Arch's repos these days. I just have to set an environment variable and edit VSCode's settin…

VSCode and Visual Studio Code are the same thing, so what do you mean? Are you saying the repo is not providing the actual VSCode?

Because VSCode and Visual Studio Code isn't the same thing.

The actual binary releases of Visual Studio Code

https://code.visualstudio.com/license

And here's the license for VSCode itself

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

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

#265

Post by exelius »

scarface74 wrote: post #161
exelius wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple being big into privacy is just a benefit of their business model - they don’t need to make money off a data as a hardware company.

I wouldn’t say it’s “just” a benefit of their business model; it’s the entire point. I don’t see Samsung making any of these moves.

Any good product organization (and Apple is one of the best) focuses on their customer. We all know that. But Apple goes further and takes their customers’ side — the iTunes Music Store was an absolute disaster for the recording industry but a huge boon for the consumer (and, of course, iPod sales).

Apple is only in a position to do this effectively because they have such a large and loyal customer base. They have a large and loyal customer base because they have consistently driven innovation in personal computing while making high-quality devices that people are willing to pay a premium for. Why would they betray that loyalty?

Apple’s business model is simple and easy to understand. I look at their balance sheet and see where the money comes from: hardware sales to consumers. You can do the same with Amazon and Google too — which shows you why their definition of “customer focus” is so different from Apple’s.

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

#266

Post by ticmasta »

maxxxxx wrote: post #111
calvinbhai wrote: post #93

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

“It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!” Stay skeptical of all of them. No need to be fan of one of the big techs. In the end they are all greedy organizations that want to dominate. None of them should be trusted.

As a developer MS has treated me really well, IMO. They churn out as much short-lived tech as the next company but I think their windows-based culture of backwards compatibility carried over into the developer ecosystem, and the future of .Net Core running in Linux containers with docker and k8s, against SQL Server on Linux would make anyone who's been away from their tech for the past 5 years think they stepped out of a time machine.

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

#267

Post by ticmasta »

scarface74 wrote: post #220
jillesvangurp wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze. Shareholders tend to look forward rather than backward and it was getting very clear that windows and office were increasingly…

If you just look at the time between 2000-2007, the first half of Ballmer’s tenure. The stock wasn’t doing well, but revenues were steadily increasing. During this time: - Apple was still on PowerPC processors until 2006 and weren’t really any threat to Microsoft. - GSuite didn’t even launch until 2006 and even today, it’s really not that much competition to MS Office. It has less than a tenth of the revenue and only…

It's also not really fair to Balmer to only evaluate performance over his time as CEO - he played a huge role during Gates' tenure as well.

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

#268

Post by ticmasta »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #250
calvinbhai wrote: post #93

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

Microsoft's hard turn for the best is a weird mirror image of Google's hard turn for the worst. It almost makes me want to give Windows a try again (ha not really). But I'd try a "Microsoft Linux" desktop (which no longer sounds like a ridiculous concept), before I would try Chrome OS.

I think that, in addition to mobile devices, the browser is the new desktop and MS has conceded that to Google with Edge to be built on Chromium, so the chance of a MS Linux seem slim. Bill Gates always talked about beating competitors by commoditizing their offering; I think you're seeing MS do that to themselves with containerization built on linux or at the most nanoserver. It may take twenty years to kill off the last version in corporate IT, but windows desktop is dead.

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

#270

Post by otikik »

stcredzero wrote: post #176
otikik wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it is extremely profitable. Before it was extremely profitable, and it had no competition.

In terms of supporting Windows on the Cloud, I would bet on Microsoft out-competing AWS.

That's a very small piece of AWS's pie.
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