Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#131

Post by m_mueller » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 2:16 AM UTC

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #116

FT_intern wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was totally bought in. why?

I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to l…

"It just works" - in my experience it really doesn't.

- I run win10 on a Vaio Canvas Z, a pretty recent machine. Graphics driver crashes regularly, although it remains stable doing so, screen freezes for around 2 seconds.

- when I wanted to install international keyboard profiles it has become way worse then older windows versions, which already weren't great. On OSX this is a totally solved problem. On Windows it would often show me the wrong thing installed until reboot, couldn't switch over to something newly added, the whole list is buggy.

- the terminal... god I hate it. It's stuck in the mid 90ies. Even Apple who supposedly doesn't care about power users anymore, has continuously improved its terminal application and it has become pretty great. On Windows I can't even have a decent color setting that would make all the standard unix colors readable without doing all kinds of hacks in .bashrc. Yes it's MinGW, but it uses the MS given terminal as-is.

- preinstalled PDF support is still a joke. Can't even annotate or rotate or really do anything with it.

- I can't get the preinstalled Mail/Calendar to reliably connect to gmail, gave up after an hour of fiddling around. That thing is a complete joke. And I hate Outlook's UI even though I've developed for it in the past.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#132

Post by mrebus » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 3:47 AM UTC

apapli wrote: post #104

There are a few comments on this thread about people disputing microsofts cloud revenues. I've got no extra intel or inside knowledge, however what I am seeing in the market suggests to me MSFTs cloud numbers are probably near to what they claim. I lead sales and marketing at a small Microsoft partner. Even though we are an edge case we haven't lost a deal against salesforce.com for quite a while, and I am hearing si…

I've been trying to find Microsoft azure sales for years. As it is cool tech but could never figure out is it was actually selling. This report is no better in its obfuscation. First they state 12bil annualized run rate, ie they made 1 billion in june their best month. then they say "we are on track to achieve $20 billion in commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate in fiscal year 2018.". why not say actual revenue but that's just me. but the kicker is I suspect that a large chunk of this revenue is office 365. and can office 365 really be considered new revenue source and not just a migration from other office sales.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#133

Post by apapli » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 3:55 AM UTC

mrebus wrote: post #132

apapli wrote: post #104

There are a few comments on this thread about people disputing microsofts cloud revenues. I've got no extra intel or inside knowledge, however what I am seeing in the market suggests to me MSFTs cloud numbers are probably near to what they claim. I lead sales and marketing at a small Microsoft partner. Even though we are an edge case we haven't lost a deal against salesforce.com for quite a while, and I am hearing si…

I've been trying to find Microsoft azure sales for years. As it is cool tech but could never figure out is it was actually selling. This report is no better in its obfuscation. First they state 12bil annualized run rate, ie they made 1 billion in june their best month. then they say "we are on track to achieve $20 billion in commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate in fiscal year 2018.". why not say actual revenu…

I'd say it's both a new revenue source and migration. But what is wrong about that?

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#134

Post by 0xFFC » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 4:16 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #81

StillBored wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 seems to be degrading rather than getting better. It seems to have reached windows ME levels of stability on most of my devices. Leaving the win7/8 machines looking pretty good. The cool kids are always messing with it, so the stodgy maintenance programmers never get a couple years to fix all the crap they break. Plus, the non stop UI "quirks" are probably worse than I can remember. The whole OS has turned…

According to Reddit, Microsoft laid off all their QA people in November of 2014: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...

This is bad. This is really really bad. This completely matches my personal experience. Microsoft QA under Nadella is only part of company I think underperforms.

As far as I can remember from "How Google tests software" , Google doesn't have whole QA division too (other than a elite kinda testers) and testing is integrated to developers job(SDET). This was not true for Microsoft for long time. It would take a lot of time for Microsoft to become on par with Google in testing.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#135

Post by 0xFFC » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 4:33 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #131

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to l…

"It just works" - in my experience it really doesn't. - I run win10 on a Vaio Canvas Z, a pretty recent machine. Graphics driver crashes regularly, although it remains stable doing so, screen freezes for around 2 seconds. - when I wanted to install international keyboard profiles it has become way worse then older windows versions, which already weren't great. On OSX this is a totally solved problem. On Windows it wo…

About terminal, After Nadella they are improving terminal as fast as possible, but it may take a little while to become available for end user:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#136

Post by 0xFFC » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 4:37 AM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #128

criddell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 is 90% great for me. The 10% that annoys me is mostly around the way update works. If you have long running processes (like security camera DVR software, big render jobs, etc...) having the OS decide to reboot in the middle of the night is a bit of a headache. I know you can disable the update service, but it would be nice if they just put that in the windows update UI. The other part that bugs me are the…

At least only major service-pack level updates actually cause everything to install/reinstall. It's kind of funny how Microsoft has their official "one version of Windows" marketing when there are clearly different versions with difficult names ("anniversary update"). But I laugh at your comment because I, as well, spent a day uninstalling the re-installed bloatware apps and re-installing my VPN client.

>"one version of Windows" marketing

You completely misunderstood the whole point. The one windows does not imply it is one thing which runs on many thing , not at all. one windows whole point is you can use same design/API for your program and target as many device as possible, kinda like Java.(but not compile once , run everywhere part)

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#137

Post by joshjje » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #100

arcanus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if MSFT had 100B USD in cash and spent it all in stock repurchase, then, in theory, its stock price wouldn't move but its market cap would go down by 100B ? In the process of buying shares back, the market capitalization would increase due to the increase in share price. The share price would absolutely move. This is why companies have stock buy-backs, in order to pump up the share price. The 'buyback ratio' is the…

If the company ends up with less cash, then its market cap should be lower, not higher. When a share is bought back by a company, accountants handle it by either cancelling the stock or turning it into treasury stock, which has negative equity value to cancel out its positive nominal value. In either case, the repurchased stock does not add value to the company. To illustrate the point, consider creating a company th…

That was a pretty good ELI5, thanks.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#138

Post by joshjje » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #35

Bud wrote: post #25

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensin…

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this…

Strange, I see many people saying the same thing, but Ive hardly had any issues at all, though it was/is undoubtedly less stable than Windows 7. I decided to just let it auto-update though, perhaps that or other different config/usage is why.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#139

Post by wvenable » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

0xFFC wrote: post #136

wvenable wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least only major service-pack level updates actually cause everything to install/reinstall. It's kind of funny how Microsoft has their official "one version of Windows" marketing when there are clearly different versions with difficult names ("anniversary update"). But I laugh at your comment because I, as well, spent a day uninstalling the re-installed bloatware apps and re-installing my VPN client.

>"one version of Windows" marketing You completely misunderstood the whole point. The one windows does not imply it is one thing which runs on many thing , not at all. one windows whole point is you can use same design/API for your program and target as many device as possible, kinda like Java.(but not compile once , run everywhere part)

Sorry I meant the "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows" marketing. The anniversary update was a whole new version of Windows and not just part of continuous stream of updates.

Re: Microsoft Shares Soar to Record on Earnings Boost From Cloud

#140

Post by candiodari » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 6:18 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #129

zzleeper wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also subtract cash from mkt cap, as both are huge for 2000s MSFT an current aapl

Why would you subtract the cash to evaluate a company? Cash can easily be turned into something with actual value, so IMO it should be included.

Exactly for the reason you say :

Market cap - what a company "owes" it's investors. Definitely on the liabilities side. The value of the company.

Cash - what a company definitely owns (and could, for instance, pay to it's investors)

So there is this measure of company's worth called "enterprise value" which is Market cap + debt - cash - assets. It sort-of is what you'd get if you acquired the company and immediately sold everything off. To put it another way : it's everything Microsoft has, other than the business it's involved in.

It can indicate that there are deals to be had. For instance if you pay $50 million for a company that has running accounts with $40 million on them, have you really paid $50 million for it ? You had control (through a company) over $50 million, and now you have control over $40 million and a company, so there is an argument to be made that you "only paid" $10 million.

So "enterprise value" is what you would really have to pay for a company, and for a lot of people considered a more useful metric than market cap.