Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

reuters.com

91–100 of 127 posts

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#91

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.

The fact that you can't say WHAT Apple should do with AI is exactly the reason they shouldn't do shit.

When you can state something concrete about Apple's products or services that can be improved with so-called "AI," let us know.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#92
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Of course investors aren't rewarding them for an upcoming VR headset which is yet to be proven. Why would they? In ~theory~ such an announcement would be priced into the markets since market capitalization is also dependent on future expected returns. Maybe investors just don't think everyone will be wearing $3000 digital fisheye goggles in a few years.

Apple Stock Falls In Minutes After 'Vision Pro' Announcement"

https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/apple-wwdc-2023/card/ap...

Also Microsoft is still selling HoloLens but for selected audience.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course investors aren't rewarding them for an upcoming VR headset which is yet to be proven. Why would they? In ~theory~ such an announcement would be priced into the markets since market capitalization is also dependent on future expected returns. Maybe investors just don't think everyone will be wearing $3000 digital fisheye goggles in a few years.

Apple Stock Falls In Minutes After 'Vision Pro' Announcement" https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/apple-wwdc-2023/card/ap... Also Microsoft is still selling HoloLens but for selected audience.

I’ve been following Apple for a long time and the stock almost always rises ahead of announcements and falls after. Pretty sure that pattern has existed for ~20 years.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorant question: Does much actually make it out of MS Research? I've seen lots of interesting retrospectives on stuff that either failed or just has never come out of the lab (Singularity/Midori, accessibility demos showing phones reading restaurant menus to the blind, their tablet pre-ipad, etc.) but I don't think I know of anything they made that really grew up off the top of my head. I didn't want to say this wi…

> Does much actually make it out of MS Research? Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but as far as actual research output that has been commercialized, there is not much to show off.

> there is not much to show off

Except a 2.8 trillion dollar valuation at the top of the biggest stock market in the world.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but Microsoft would be equally dead without Office and Azure revenue. One way to think about this is that Apple isn't diversified enough. Another way to think about it is that Microsoft's long tail is a mess.

> Fair enough, but Microsoft would be equally dead without Office and Azure revenue. Office and Azure make up half of their revenue, but their other revenue streams are actually different things, like Windows, gaming, LinkedIn, Bing advertising. It's actual diversification.

People forget that Apple of today probably wouldn't be around if Microsoft hadn't given them $150M to save them from bankruptcy in 1997[1].

With the introduction of IE in 1995 and its deep integration into Win95 and ruthless take-no-prisoners assault on Netscape, Microsoft was probably already aware that they were starting to resemble a monopoly, given Apple's poor sales and market share at the time. My personal take is that MS propped up Apple to help appear to have a competitor ahead of the Antitrust action in 2001[2].

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#96
post #2

Re-overtakes. It's happened several times.

But that makes it somewhat entertaining :-) Have you ever heard of the German sports club "Bayern Munich" ("FC Bayern")? They've won all national titles since 2013! _That_ is boring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Bayern_Munich

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#97

Apple needs to become a player in the cloud space. OS agnostic just like the other three big players. It's a big mistake they didn't invest in the space earlier.

Do you really think that it would be a good fit? Apple is mostly a hardware company, although this hardware obviously needs some software and a part of it runs in the cloud these days. But at least my impression is that they are not really in the B2B market with professional services.

To enter the cloud market they are pretty late to the game ...

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#98
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t need to beat OpenAI if they plan to play a different game. The biggest question mark, like you mention, is how innovative can Apple be under Tim Cook? Are there systems and people in place to serve as those visionaries when the CEO is an operator at heart? I often wonder how much of what we’ve seen was in the pipeline when Jobs was still around, or is simply taken from what is popular in the moment vs havi…

Apple Pencil is an example of a nicely designed product that Steve Jobs almost certainly did not contribute to (he hated styluses).

The 2nd gen Apple Pencil, which charged wirelessly, yes. The first one was an abomination and the latest release doesn’t seem much better.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#99

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... .

Yeah, but that would still have been a poor investment strategy. You have to manage the risk. And you can only do that by looking forward, not backward.

Re: Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company

#100
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also people don't realize how local Apple is. In a lot of countries you can't even access their services which decreases the value of their devices.

But oddly enough one of those countries isn't China. Its weird how Google and Facebook can't do much their while everything from Apple works as well as anywhere else.

This comment made me feel unnecessarily old. It was only ~15 years ago that we went through all the drama of tech companies deciding whether or not they’d play ball. It’s not that Google can’t, it’s that they decided that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Apple decided otherwise. They’re very different companies selling very different things.
Post reply on HN