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Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

reuters.com

21–30 of 127 posts

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#21
Microsoft's recent stock gains are obviously due to AI hype and the expected returns from it, but does the company actually have obvious lines of revenue from AI to that degree? Looking at the numbers investors are expecting them to make more from LLMs than they do from products like Windows and Office.

I don't want to use the "bubble" word, but...

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#22
post #15

The main things I see lately are: Apple is creating VR headsets and new chip technology, Microsoft is buying up AI companies and injecting ads/spyware into their operating systems. Also Microsoft is getting big into cloud. Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.

Ok, so one of those technologies potentially saves people time and levels the playing field by enabling the use of computers with less special training to achieve equivalent results. The other one aims to strap screens to other people's faces to keep them even longer in a perpetually-online computer bubble of their own choosing, because that's been going great for society so far.

> Ok, so one of those technologies potentially saves people time and levels the playing field by enabling the use of computers with less special training to achieve equivalent results.

Did you forget allowing the sum total of human knowledge to be swamped by dogshit, because it allows for the creation of dogshit at scale more cheaply than ever before?

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#23

Apple just needs to do SOMETHING exciting with AI. Vision Pro looks great, but it's only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. I'm not sure if they're just too big to move at the speed they need to move or if it's something more damning about their internal culture but they need to do something in this space faster than I think most people realize.

Or maybe they just need to survive long enough to see what is actually valuable in AI and not going to damn their company.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#24
post #20

The main things I see lately are: Apple is creating VR headsets and new chip technology, Microsoft is buying up AI companies and injecting ads/spyware into their operating systems. Also Microsoft is getting big into cloud. Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.

Microsoft is much more diversified than that. They have entire consulting services and a world class research arm and many other things that Apple has no analog of.

> world class research arm

Honest question: does Wall Street care? In my experience, this is the kind of thing that’s (rightly or wrongly) considered a “cost center”, not a “profit center”.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#25

The main things I see lately are: Apple is creating VR headsets and new chip technology, Microsoft is buying up AI companies and injecting ads/spyware into their operating systems. Also Microsoft is getting big into cloud. Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.

Microsoft is one of the most diversified companies in existence. Pretty much every business, every government and most consumers around the world are directly or indirectly paying them money for something, whether software, devices, consulting, cloud, data. On the other hand Apple's success for the last 15 years has relied on a single device. Now that the device is running into some issues (dropping sales in China, general stall in innovation, regulatory hurdles) their stock price is reacting accordingly.

Of course investors aren't rewarding them for an upcoming VR headset which is yet to be proven. Why would they?

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#27
post #21

Microsoft's recent stock gains are obviously due to AI hype and the expected returns from it, but does the company actually have obvious lines of revenue from AI to that degree? Looking at the numbers investors are expecting them to make more from LLMs than they do from products like Windows and Office. I don't want to use the "bubble" word, but...

People expect LLM's to be folded into Office, and MS to command a premium for the real or perceived productivity boost.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#28
Bill Gates, at time of IPO owned 49% of Microsoft.

If he hadn’t sold his stock, he’d be worth ~$1.5 Trillion

To put that into context, he'd be worth 6x Elon Musk (who's the current riches person-in-the-world)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire....

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#29

Bill Gates, at time of IPO owned 49% of Microsoft. If he hadn’t sold his stock, he’d be worth ~$1.5 Trillion To put that into context, he'd be worth 6x Elon Musk (who's the current riches person-in-the-world) https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire... .

But there would be a shit ton more polio in the world, so I'll accept that tradeoff.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#30

Apple just needs to do SOMETHING exciting with AI. Vision Pro looks great, but it's only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. I'm not sure if they're just too big to move at the speed they need to move or if it's something more damning about their internal culture but they need to do something in this space faster than I think most people realize.

Apple is rarely first to release new tech. They watch and develop quietly in the lab, then release an implementation that everyone else seems to copy.

So far their approach has been different, but their last keynote mentioned ML countless times. We can only assume they have more in the pipeline, and it will run locally on-device, which seems preferable to all the data collection being done with most companies working on AI.

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