Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by abrichr » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

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.

> AWS is cheaper than everyone else.

Can you provide a source for this please? I recently priced out AWS, Azure, and GCP for GPU workloads. I found that AWS and Azure were approximately on par, whereas GCP was significantly cheaper:

AWS p3.8xlarge: $12.24/hr [1]

Azure NC24 v3: $12.24/hr [2]

GCP n1-highmem-32: $8.311/hour [3]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p3/

[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

[3] https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

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

#32

Post by loudmax » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

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 compared to Windows.

Outside of Windows and Mac, you're in Open Source land, which is great if you're technically minded and want to tinker and explore, but not much of an option for folks who just want their computers to work with the consumer software and file formats around them. Other than Apple, where are the commercial alternatives to Microsoft?

I'd be much more sympathetic to Nardella's renaissance if it meant real consumer choice. The situation is better than it was under Ballmer, but not as good as it could be in a real free marketplace.

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

#33

Post by oneplane » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

newsoul2019 wrote: post #27

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 nothing else, they could really differentiate >> and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint >> to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. I didn't realize I wanted this, but now I do.

Same here. But we should keep in mind that there is no guarantee that their stance stays the same, and they pretty much only answer to money and nothing/nobody else.

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

#34

Post by oneplane » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

I like line about market cap being a useless metric for your own success. It's great on the meta-business side of things, but for real-world things it's hardly relevant.

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

#35

Post by thrower123 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

max76 wrote: post #28

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.

Why would someone choose Azure over AWS because they currently use Exchange? An Exchange server can easily be ran inside an EC2 instance inside AWS.

It's kind of all linked together. If you use Exchange, the natural evolution to the cloud is moving to Office 365, which then entails a bunch of knock-on effects. Once you are linked in to the Azure ecosystem, it is hard to break out.

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

#36

Post by spectramax » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

johnday wrote: post #29

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…

> “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. What? The IntelliCode description says that "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings.". I'm not clear on how you think Microsoft will harvest data from doing this - much less how it is re…

There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs.

I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are discussing here.

At the end, it is irrelevant how they're collecting data - all you need to know is this: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us

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

#37

Post by eropple » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

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.

I agree with you that Azure is a catastrophically miserable dev experience, but it's a mistake to compare price based on list prices. I've worked with companies who are based in India whose Azure cost through a CSP was like 40% of list. I've also had customers get huge, huge discounts offered to them to use Google Cloud. I don't know how low Amazon goes.

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

#38

Post by rdslw » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

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 and nothing more.

If you have a big userbase you can monetize it really really well.

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

#39

Post by max76 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

From the cloud perspective Azure has a better privacy pitch than AWS has.

Amazon is currently expanding into markets at such a rate everyone is afraid their market will be next. Microsoft currently is staying in their lane. If someone is going to be invading my privacy I'd rather it not be a direct competitor.

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

#40

Post by spectramax » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #33

newsoul2019 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If nothing else, they could really differentiate >> and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint >> to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook. I didn't realize I wanted this, but now I do.

Same here. But we should keep in mind that there is no guarantee that their stance stays the same, and they pretty much only answer to money and nothing/nobody else.

The thing with privacy stance is that it is primarily based on trust. If Microsoft now goes into privacy centric company, nothing makes me trust them as much as I trust them going back into selling ads after 5 years.

It is a sensitive branding issue.