Microsoft Could Be First Tech Company To Reach Trillion-Dollar Market Value: Analyst (geekwire.com) 232
Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn could help the Redmond company become the first technology giant to reach a market value of $1 trillion, or so thinks a notable analyst. Analyst Michael Markowski believes that Microsoft will be able to leverage LinkedIn to become a leader in social media space and the emerging crowdfunding platform. So much so that it will beat Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in becoming the first company to hit $1 trillion market value. From a report on GeekWire: Here are the market caps of these big tech companies as of Monday morning: Apple: $622.6B, Alphabet: $549.7B, Microsoft: $489.3B, Amazon: $358.7B, and Facebook: $337.6B. "The public has an insatiable appetite for making small bets and purchasing lottery tickets, etc., that provide the chance to make a big profit," Markowski wrote. "The millennials will be a good example. Many will want to routinely invest $100 or even less into high-risk ventures that could produce returns of 10X to 100X." Microsoft, through LinkedIn, will be able to take advantage of this trend because it has a monopoly on the business social media sphere. Markowski predicts that all the big tech companies will eventually build services to facilitate crowdfunding investments.
640 billion USD... (Score:5, Funny)
... ought to be enough market capitalization for anyone.
History lesson for the newbies here [computerworld.com]
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Only funny comment and it had to be moderated into visibility?
Not very funny, either, but what part of the joke justified for called for the AC status?
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Some of us actually like not being tracked 24/7 and put action to our principles of privacy and living by the quality of our words, not merely reputation.
Feels like being a stranger in a strange land to see someone on a tech news site, someone that ought to know the virtues of anonymity, have a view so askew that they no longer understand why someone would be AC on principle. Doubly so for slashdot.
From the beginning up to about eight years ago the common wisdom was to be anonymous whenever you could. Now p
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Re: 640 billion USD... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm so sick of reading that horse shit that's coming from your mouth. Why the fucking Christ do I need an account? Does that somehow add some sort of official credibility? We all know that fake news never comes from named accounts!
I've been here since the slashdot early days and I still don't have an account.
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What do you have against ACs? Ignore them if you want, but quit yer bellyachin'
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
ZZ
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^3
We heard this before... (Score:4, Funny)
Great Recession 2.0 coming? (Score:5, Informative)
The last time we had this much debt and high market valuations was last decade. This time around instead of homes the junk derivitives are car loans, payday centers, and other places. I read it is over 2 trillion in bad car loans that are flipped each year as poor folks with low credit like my boss with a 550 score can get a $30,000 truck no money down no problem ... still at %22 interest though. Foreign debt as well in the EU with bonds for countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain.
Add to this the market valuations and a dangerous president (please Republican viewers this is not a liberal rant) who is anti globalization & china and a possible broken up EU with France and Italy possible leaving it if more far alt-right leaders get elected and I predict a disaster!
The only thing keeping us afloat it seems is China and people flipping things and offshoring debt. Once tarrifs come into play again with Trump and a falling apart of the EU if La Penne and Germany's future alt-right leader leave will stop the gravy train and the cards will collapse.
What do you all think?
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The last time we had this much debt and high market valuations was last decade. This time around instead of homes the junk derivitives are car loans, payday centers, and other places.
Student loans
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Oh, and China is selling its US bonds to prop up the ailing RMB right now, they are not buying new US debt.
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Sounds about right. Dave Ramsey quoted a statistic that only 15 to 17% pay cash for their cars. Meaning the rest couldn't afford them
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Look, my investments pay more than the 0% financing I got on my current car. I could move a little money around and pay it off next week if I wanted, but it would cost me money in the long run. Debt is bad if the interest rate is higher than earnings from investments. I pay credit card companies no interest, my mortgage is at 4.5% and is a tax deduction, our cars are 0-1% interest.
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In short, there won't be another financial crisis like the last one, because we know how to avoid it (ie, give free money to banks). There mig
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Except all the money "given to banks" in the bailout was a *loan* that's been paid back in full
Lies....TARP was paid back through other FED initiatives to give money to banks.....like QE or actually buying mortgage backed securities at above market price.
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If you owe the bank $100,000 then they have you by the balls. If you owe the bank $100,000,000,000 then you have them by the balls.
The private sector situation is much more interesting. Manufacturing of many goods has left western civilizations shores, and now even some services are being provided by the 3rd world. The question is how quickly can these things return if need be. I suspect most of it can return with
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w.r.t. government debt, if a collapse comes, America and Europe will still be on top of it. If you owe the bank $100,000 then they have you by the balls. If you owe the bank $100,000,000,000 then you have them by the balls.
Worth mentioning that the US government alone has defaulted twice in the last century on their debt (under Roosevelt seizing gold, and under Nixon saying money isn't worth gold anymore).
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Gold isn't money. Gold is a commodity, and the attempt to use it as money led to a lot of bad things.
Bad foundation (Score:5, Funny)
What has Microsoft got that Linux hasn't? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hint: It is NOT superior software. At least not any way that I can define it, but perhaps I'm just too twisted in thinking that different people think differently and therefore a single superior solution does not exist?
Answer: It's the financial models.
Flogging the dead horse, but I still believe Linux remains essentially irrelevant because the financial models are bad, but I'm too tired of the fight to even often alternatives at this point... Unless someone encourages me, eh?
My interpretation of Microsoft's success is that there is almost no there (= innovation) there. Even the innovations in their financial models were copied, but at least in the financial models they substantially improved them:
(1) Legal evasion of liability via the EULA. If Microsoft were liable for the harms caused by their software then the company would have gone bankrupt long ago.
(2) Selling upstream to the makers, not downstream to the actual end users.
Just picking on what I regard as the two biggies, though if Microsoft does reach the trillion-dollar market cap, it will largely depend on stealing Apple's business models (more effectively than the google can steal them).
Still bogus in terms of solving any real problem. There is no number that is large enough to "solve" that kind of greed. That's why big companies have to become so EVIL these years, but I predict that Trump will figure out how to make the bad situation worse.
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I hate typos. "to even often" should be "to even offer".
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Just picking on what I regard as the two biggies, though if Microsoft does reach the trillion-dollar market cap, it will largely depend on stealing Apple's business models (more effectively than the google can steal them).
No. They will make it based on their cloud offerings, Azure is their growth right now. Windows isn't a big deal for Microsoft anymore [computerworld.com], just a small portion of revenue. That is why they are willing to move so much to Linux.
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I'm not clear about your point there. Everyone is pushing their cloud offerings hard at this point, though I don't see Apple as any sort of leader in that area. Seems to me like Amazon is still running away with it, though I want to give credit to Sun for coming up with the idea first. The big question for me as regards cloud computing is why Sun didn't manage to establish a dominant position. I don't think they were too early, but I may be overlooking some key technological problems. If not a technological
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I'm not clear about your point there.
Did you read the article I linked to?
The big question for me as regards cloud computing is why Sun didn't manage to establish a dominant position.
My guess is because they were focused on scientific computing, not web hosting. At least, that's the impression I got at the time.
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Nope, I didn't read it. Your citation makes it sound like too many other articles that I have already read, but more importantly, your tone convinced me that you work in the Microsoft food chain, and therefore I discounted your recommendation.
Based upon your insistence, I just looked at it, and it turned out to confirm my understanding and position. What a shock. Not. I would have thought my concurrence was obvious from what I had already written in this thread, but either I wrote poorly, I relied too much
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I'm not clear about your point there.......Based upon your insistence, I just looked at it,
ok, good.
The point is, Windows is dead. It's only a small portion of the revenue anymore, and falling. Their own internal goal is to make money based on the cloud. That is what the CEO wants. That is the only way they can grow revenue to the point that they are worth $1trillion. If we're lucky, they'll die, but we're not lucky.
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What Microsoft Windows has that Linux largely doesn't is network effects. Since most people run it, most vendors provide software for it, and so people buy MS Windows to run the software they bought. Problems that show up in MS Windows happen to a lot of people, so community web support is very good. Moreover, MS has a reputation for making good enough software. (Microsoft - it's not just good, it's just good enough.)
Linux doesn't attract anywhere near the amount of vendors, and it has the problem th
Trillionaires needs. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Markowski predicts that all the big tech companies will eventually build services to facilitate crowdfunding investments."
Yeah because heaven forbid we ask the trillionaires of the world to actually pay for their own fucking shit.
"The public has an insatiable appetite for making small bets and purchasing lottery tickets, etc., that provide the chance to make a big profit," Markowski wrote. "The millennials will be a good example. Many will want to routinely invest $100 or even less into high-risk ventures that could produce returns of 10X to 100X..."
Find me a financial advisor that would ever equate buying fucking lottery tickets as an "investment".
Cut the bullshit and call it what it is; acts of desperation.
And it's no surprise Millennials are rather desperate. Not much to look forward to these days when monopolies with more money than most small countries have the unmitigated gall to turn to crowdsourcing to fund their ventures.
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Find me a financial advisor that would ever equate buying fucking lottery tickets as an "investment".
Actually, I just read a mathematical explanation of when you should do so. Certain rollover lotteries can become overvalued when no one wins. In that case, it can be a winning strategy to buy ALL of the possible combinations.
Unfortunately, I've been reading a lot of math books lately, so I'm not sure which one mentioned this... Probably Alex's Adventures in Numberland , also published as Here's Looking at Euclid . (Obvious Alex likes puns.)
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In that case, it can be a winning strategy to buy ALL of the possible combinations.
It's a great strategy until someone else also chooses the winning ticket, and you have to share the winnings (happens a lot). Then the government takes a huge portion as taxes..........
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According to the book I read, that isn't as big a problem as it would seem. However, I would think that the larger problem now that the book has been published is that a number of people might use the SAME strategy, and then you'd be seriously troubled.
Also, if I were running that lottery, I would certainly change the rules to penalize that strategy as some form of cheating.
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How and why? How are you going to prevent someone from buying hundreds of millions of tickets and just presenting the ones that win? Why would you prevent your customers from buying hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff that's cheap to produce?
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^4
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Find me a financial advisor that would ever equate buying fucking lottery tickets as an "investment".
Actually, I just read a mathematical explanation of when you should do so. Certain rollover lotteries can become overvalued when no one wins. In that case, it can be a winning strategy to buy ALL of the possible combinations.
And I have a logical explanation to debunk that strategy altogether. If you can afford to buy ALL the possible combinations to a lottery, then you don't need to be playing the lottery. That strategy is nothing more than one devised by millionaires looking to show how they "beat" the system, one way (winning), or another (writing off the loss under some tax loophole).
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Find me a financial advisor that would ever equate buying fucking lottery tickets as an "investment".
Actually, I just read a mathematical explanation of when you should do so. Certain rollover lotteries can become overvalued when no one wins. In that case, it can be a winning strategy to buy ALL of the possible combinations.
And I have a logical explanation to debunk that strategy altogether. If you can afford to buy ALL the possible combinations to a lottery, then you don't need to be playing the lottery. That strategy is nothing more than one devised by millionaires looking to show how they "beat" the system, one way (winning), or another (writing off the loss under some tax loophole).
I'm sorry that I didn't explain the math clearly enough, though I regarded it as a minor point. A normal lottery only pays out about half of the take, but certain rollover lotteries will not award the large prizes if no one has picked the winning number, and the prize money rolls over into the next cycle. If this happens several times, the lottery has become almost a sure thing if you can buy tickets for ALL of the possible winning numbers. There is some risk of having to split with other winners, but there
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You can deduct gambling losses up to the extent of gambling winnings, so I'd suspect you're only on the IRS hook for the profit. For the average person who buys ten tickets and gets real lucky, this isn't important, but if you're covering all possible combinations you definitely want to save the receipts.
Buying up hacked properties ... (Score:2)
... adds value?
LinkedIn was hacked four years ago, and what initially seemed to be a theft of 6.5 million passwords has actually turned out to be a breach of 117 million passwords. [cnn.com]
Value of LinkedIn (Score:2)
Does anybody actually use LinkedIn for anything? It seems to be the most useless social media company going.
I've had a LinkedIn account since they started and although I'm always typing in my LInkedIn credentials to connect my LinkedIn account to third parties, I've probably spent a grand total of six actual hours using LinkedIn. I use Facebook more than six hours per day.
Rarely does one large tech company acquiring another large tech company (both in terms of valuation) ever work. I foresee Microsoft dumpi
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What on Earth would you be doing on Facebook for six hours a day?
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What on Earth would you be doing on Facebook for six hours a day?
Cat pics
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Yet people who really know things (Score:2)
This is a pretty impressive milestone as a failure of capitalism, I hope we feel it's full import and act accordingly.
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Microsoft's products are generally of good quality. Windows is a pretty solid operating system (pity about the UI changes from 7). Office is generally easy to use (possibly disregarding the controversial ribbon), and works well. I don't like the design decisions as much as I like those of Linux distros and F/OS software, but there's really not that much that I can point to objectively. I'm annoyed that VC++ lags well behind g++ and clang in standards conformance, but it does catch up eventually (is the
Extremely Unlikely (Score:2)
I'm not quite sure what the guy that wrote this article is smoking, but there is pretty much no way LinkedIn is going to push MSFT above the $1 trillion mark. Sure the only thing he claims at that MSFT will make $1 trillion before Apple or Alphabet, but at current growth rates none of those companies are going to be in the ball park of $1 trillion valuation for 5-10 years at least, probably longer. It seems unlikely that LinkedIn is the killer acquisition that is going to drive their growth for the next dec
Why listen to financial analysts at all? (Score:3)
Wake up: The job of financial analysts is to pump up the market by getting people to invest in it. It's not to give useful advice, or to be right, or to report the truth or anything related to the truth. They are part of the infotainment media segment and their target market is the greedy, fearful, foolish, and ignorant individual investor.
Analysts always say that the future is great.They may occasionally say that one company is less then stellar. They mostly do this to give the false impression that they know something. Of course there is the small contingent that says that everything is just a heartbeat away from going to hell, but they are just the mirror image of the "it's all swell" crowd. Neither group has any proven capacity to predict what will happen. Just look at the disclaimers they all attach to the swill they all spew out.
Anyone who has a handle on how the market, or a specific stock, will perform will never tell the likes of you. They will keep it to themselves and make a killing or advise the people with real wealth and also make a killing.
Remember, you are the sucker in this game. To assume anything else is egomania. The deck is stacked and the house makes a guaranteed profit. And when they screw up the taxpayers (i.e. not the wealthy) pick up the tab.
If you want to see how things really work watch The Big Short. It's a really good movie with some great performances. It will make you laugh until you realize that nothing has changed since 2008. They same greedy assholes are still running the game for their own profit, but now it is going to be much, much worse. The asshats that Trump puts in place will make Greenspan and Paulson seem like financial Einsteins, rather then the architects of the biggest crash since the Great Depression.
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Credit agencies were definitely deficient, but you'd think a self-respecting bank would look carefully before making big investments. I've heard "due diligence" tossed around as a phrase.
Realtors can only sell property to people who can get mortgages. There were plenty of mortgage companies that sold off every mortgage they issued. They were able to do this because banks would buy them, including NINJA loans (No INcome, Job, or Assets). The banks bought bad investments like there was no tomorrow, sli
Too big to fail... (Score:2)
It's clear that no one has learned anything from the 2008 financial crisis. There was all this talk of "too big to fail". In the end, that hasn't even been applied to the banking sector, but frankly, it applies to any company. Beyond a certain size, the existence of a huge company becomes arguably detrimental to society as a whole. Too much power, too much influence, too many subsidiaries that appear independent, but actually aren't, and can work together to influence markets.
Any organization* above size "X
Not Apple, but likely Amazon (Score:2)
I've been using Apple products since 2004 and with the neutering of the pro lines I'm not looking forward to another Apple purchase. Fanboyism only will get them so far and they don't have another Steve Jobs
Amazon could hit this easily with a dominant market position.
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So now gambling is a special millennial trait?
Well, around the turn of 0th millenium Roman writers complained about the youngins gambling, having no respect for their parents and the gods, so I guess that's a data point.
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Reality is an unlikely outcome, and a terrible gamble.
But, for us old farts, we would interpret this as either Microsoft isn't going away, and is likely to hold value, or, Pump and Dump alert. You pick...
Totally agree. No big companies until everyone has (Score:4, Insightful)
> Should any company have this much capitalisation when there are people living homeless on the streets?
I totally agree. A bunch of people shouldn't be allowed to pool their money and build a $9 billion semiconductor foundry until everyone has good jobs first. Nobody should be putting money into building factories while other people a aren't working. What good does building a billion dollar shipping port do for all those people needing work? How could investors spending $1.5 billion constructing a hospital complex possibly benefit the surrounding community?
Well come to think of it, a company with a billion dollars of capital, or a trillion dollars, is probably paying a few people. Maybe Microsoft does write $10 billion in pay checks every year. Maybe it's kinda good to have hospitals, including specialist facilities that attract people from all over the world to come get treatment in your city (and pay for it in your city).
Maybe when TSMC invested $9.3 billion in their latest fab, most of that $9.3 billion ended up as some schmuck's paycheck - from the construction workers who framed the buildings to the people pulling cable through it and the engineers designing the various machinery that fabs the wafers.
It occurs to me that Ethiopia, Niger, and Bangladesh don't have any big companies doing big projects, and they're among the poorest countries in the world. The big companies are in the United States, the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland both nominally and actually - which happen to be the richest countries in the world. Maybe having big, big companies building really big projects has SOME advantages.
But what's missing is that Joe Blow like you and I should be able to get a piece of the action. Instead of some king or whatever owning a semiconductor fab or a shipping port facility by spending a billion of THEIR money to build it, we should all be allowed to get a little piece of the ownership, and a little piece of the profit, by chipping in a little bit of the money to build it. I should be able to chip in $29, and you chip in $290 or whatever. A million people could each put in a little bit and we'll split the profits fairly, based on how much we put in. THAT would be cool. It should be open to any member of the public who wants to participate. We could call it a "public company". Wouldn't it be cool if you could own a piece of TSMC right now for $29? Maybe you could pitch in $60 and become an owner of Microsoft.
You can get your share of TSMC profits for $29, of course, or buy a share of Microsoft for $60. Half the people on Slashdot do. Some people don't realize that they can, because nobody ever explained it to them in an understandable way. Some people know that they CAN, but prefer to instead spend that $60 buying something FROM Microsoft, such as an XBox controller, rather than using their $60 buy MICROSOFT. That's fine if that's what they want to do, of course. A few people are really silly - they decide to spend their money buying FROM Microsoft, then whine and complain that I decided to invest my money buying Microsoft - becoming an owner. They keep whining and they keep being broke buying Xbox and Starbucks lattes. That works fine for me because instead of buying lattes for a month I bought Starbucks stock - the silly people are paying ME $8 for a cup flavored water and milk. Kinda makes me wanna shout at them though "buy the company, not the coffee, and you won't be broke anymore dummy."
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I think that was the original reason for public companies to exist. Unfortunately, any real investment is now so far abstracted from shareholders that it barely registers. On one side are the investment banks doing high frequency trading and demanding constant increased revenue, and on the other are the intermediate mutual funds, hedge funds and others that own most of a public company's shares. Individual investors have very little to do with a company's success -- most hot tech stocks don't even pay divid
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If there are huge mountains, how comes I can hurt myself by kicking a small stone?
Re:Bubble, idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
MicroShaft is no more valuable today than it was ten years ago. I would argue that it is worth A LOT LESS.
Wrong. Microsoft has made vastly more profit in the last 10 years than before. And if you look at their revenue, they experienced an almost linear growth since 1995, going from 6 to 95 billions. They also have posted a profit every year since 1985, unlike Apple for instance who started making more money than Microsoft only in 2010.
By any standard, Microsoft is more valuable now than 10 years ago (which happens to be more or less the last period when calling them "MicroShaft" was somewhat clever).
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also Windows 10 is just starting its money-making phase in the enterprise. Over the next year or two this will be a highly profitable segment for Microsoft. At the same time, SQL Server now runs on Linux (it can even run in Docker containers!) and this is going to make a serious dent in Oracle's market share, as many organizations have been waiting to escape the Oracle life-sucking contracts for a long time.
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
SQL Server now runs on Linux (it can even run in Docker containers!) and this is going to make a serious dent in Oracle's market share, as many organizations have been waiting to escape the Oracle life-sucking contracts for a long time.
Wow, going from Oracle to MS SQL?
Thus demonstrating that people who make bad decisions make bad decisions, I guess.......
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SQL Server now runs on Linux (it can even run in Docker containers!) and this is going to make a serious dent in Oracle's market share, as many organizations have been waiting to escape the Oracle life-sucking contracts for a long time.
Wow, going from Oracle to MS SQL?
Thus demonstrating that people who make bad decisions make bad decisions, I guess.......
Ok Microsoft bashing aside, please provide information to support your comment.
Because here's the real picture:
1) SQL Server offers the same or better performance than Oracle on similar hardware
2) SQL Server does not require expert-level tuning to work
3) Oracle just recently released an exciting new feature (multiple databases per server, which requires a special license) that has been available in any other RDBMS since forever
4) Oracle somewhat recently started supporting case-insensivite compare, which ha
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Postgres > MS SQL > mysql
But there's no reason to pay either Oracle's or Microsoft's licensing costs.
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But there's no reason to pay either Oracle's or Microsoft's licensing costs.
In the enterprise world you're often stuck with vendor requirements. Most ERPs for instance support Oracle and SQL Serve, some also support DB2, but they never support MySQL or Postgresql. Even if you know full well that they're using JDBC and that it would work with other RDBMS, you have to live with their requirements or they won't certify your setup, which is like voiding the warranty on an expensive new car. If the company is paying $250,000 / year in ERP licenses, plus a cool mil or two for the impleme
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Microsoft is not cheap but they are less likely to shove extra licenses down your throat just because they can.
Not sure that's true, I've seen them try to push MSDN licenses pretty hard.
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No, only people who fail to comprehend how much mobile is usurping the desktop PC would say that. It turns out that there are many roles in a corporation that don't require a PC. Fewer PCs means lower deployment, maintenance, license, and support costs.
No, only people who fail to comprehend how many of the small to medium sized businesses have switched to hosted Gmail (to my chagrin) instead of deploying MS Exchange would say that. Now, Gartner says that Azure is taking off, but Gartner says a lot of shit t
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is attempting to live off that hackneyed old model of parachuting in consultants to enterprises who they feel are too stupid to "get" cloud on their own. They'll sell them expensive services to help those dinosaurs forklift ancient applications onto the cloud until those enterprises mature (or simply die) and figure out that they can get what they actually need (and at a significantly more reasonable cost) with AWS and Google.
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
"they still hold a 90% desktop market share" I find that hard to believe. I work for a Fortune 50 company and the vast majority of people I come in contact with around the company use Macs. When I'm in large group meetings and look around I see a sea of Mac Books. And this isn't a technology company. We are a manufacturing company. Of course this is just one anecdote from one company, but I see the same thing at coffee shops, conferences, people's homes, etc. They either use mac book laptops, tablets (not the surface), or phones (not Microsoft phones). Other than Outlook and Powerpoint I see few MS products being used. I've actually been surprised that they've been able to stay in business and not they are talking about MS reaching 1 trillion? I'm honestly flabbergasted.
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Well if you leave that bubble you'll quickly see why. In my neighborhood, there isn't an apple product on my block, and everywhere I have worked in the last 3 years (I contract short term mostly) is 95% windows.
If you're that surprised you need to stand up and look around a bit more.
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Microsoft's enterprise market share and entrance into cloud computing are significant. The desktop market share is much less so. The average home desktop owner would be better served by a decent tablet with keyboard, and Microsoft has approximately no market share in mobile, and isn't going to get much.
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
I think most people would say over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost their position as the market leader.
Valuation is based on expected future profits, not market dominance. Anyway, Microsoft is clearly the market leader in desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools. They don't do well in phones and tablets, but that is a different market.
Re: Bubble, idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is: "desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools" isn't a growing market any more, and MS is losing pricing power there as technology evolves. E.g., Word was one the killer app, but if you share documents online instead of in print, Word has no real value. XL and PPT have staying power, but MS is starting to offer them on other platforms, so the OS lock-in isn't what it was.
If MS has a future, it's in the server space, They're trying to make Azure competitive with AWS, but right now it's still small in comparison, and most of the Azure business is existing MS sever companies moving to Azure for a deep discount. Almost no one is starting new companies or projects with the back-end in Azure.
They might yet pull it out, thanks to all the market presence they have to work with, but unless something changes they're doomed to a gradually shrinking base of established customers, much like Oracle. I do expect they'll outlive Oracle, though, since MS only pisses off their customers, while Oracle pisses on them.
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That's a lot of words for "We hated Balmer 'cause we didn't deem it possible that someone even shittier could succeed him".
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Re:Bubble, idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's high market valuation is solely the result of having issued billions of shares of stock.
That's not how it works. If anything, the more stock you sell the lower the price goes. That's why investors love when a company has a good buyback program.
This said, as a normal investor there are two typical ways to make money in the stock market.
1) buy low, sell high
2) hold a position and reap dividends
Assuming an investment made a year ago:
For scenario 1:
-> return on Apple stock: 10%
-> return on Microsoft stock: 13%
-> return on IBM stock: 20%
-> return on JC Penney stock: 47%
For scenario 2:
-> dividends on Apple stock: 2%
-> dividends on Microsoft stock: 2.5%
-> dividends on IBM stock: 3.2%
-> dividends on JC Penney stock: 0%
Now I'm pretty sure that's not what most people would have expected. But most people don't hold on stock for a long time nowadays, they tend to speculate and over time they lose their shirt because by the time the hype/panic reaches the normal investors, it's already too late. There's nothing wrong with speculation but it's closer to gambling than investment.
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You might be surprised but most investors do hold on stock for a long time.
And you know that how? Please provide a link, I've tried to find that kind of metric for a long time.
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I hold stock for a long time, and everyone generalizes from one example.
Best I can do.
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I wonder if Microsoft will get a bailout like GM did?
Re:Bubble, idiot (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder if Microsoft will get a bailout like GM did?
GM got the bailout because they employed a lot of people, and paid "defined benefit" pensions to even more people. Microsoft employs far fewer, and has no DB pension program. Also, nearly half of Microsoft's employees are not Americans.
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If Microsoft overtakes Apple in the next 24 months I'll eat my fucking keyboard.
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Apple is only worth 25% more than MS. MS earnings grew in 2016, while Apple's shrank. MS has a clear path for growth: Azure might actually take off one day. Apple doesn't really: the mobile market is saturated, and they need a wholly new product line to return to fast growth (which, admittedly, they've done before, but it's not clear what that would be).
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Net profit margin is useless when comparing across types of sales. Apple is primarily a hardware company. They make money from selling stuff that costs money to design and to make. Microsoft is primarily a software company. They make money from selling stuff that costs money to design but is trivial to make.
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Absolutely. Plus analysts are notoriously bad. Like, really, really bad. I don't trust anything they say without doing my own math.
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Or stock market shill.
Yeah, what a total stock market shill, he comes here and promotes stocks as opposed to bonds or other forms of financial instruments. Shame on him!
Also: I don't think you know what shill means.
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shill (n.) Look up shill at Dictionary.com
"one who acts as a decoy for a gambler, auctioneer, etc.," 1916, probably originally circus or carnival argot, probably a shortened form of shillaber (1913) with the same meaning, origin unknown. The verb is attested from 1914. Related: Shilled; shilling.
So I should have said: "he probably owns investments under other peoples names and wants to sell them to suckers at a high price."
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So I should have said: "he probably owns investments under other peoples names and wants to sell them to suckers at a high price."
well it's still better than an investment banker, who also sells stuff to suckers at a high price but doesn't own shit and never takes a personal risk.
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M$ is clearly hugely over valued, proof of that is, they can not longer reliably attract of keep customers to invade the privacy, they must buy them in by buying companies that already have them and then desperately try to retain them as long as possibly as they sell those customers privacy down the river for what ever M$ can get. I no longer do any business with M$ or any company they own and have only one legacy bit of software left to play games, the toy operating system.
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The whole Safeway/Haggen thing is a fantastic tale of corporate greed and dishonesty; something one would expect from Big Oil or Big Tobacco but not from the place where one buys their Corn Flakes and ground beef (extra lean).
The Haggen people though they had found a good deal, but apparently when it comes down to grocery store mergers it's just like backroom poker games - if you don't know who's the mark it means you're it.
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If you dont know what market cap means, dont jump into market cap discussions acting like an expert.
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neither Microsoft or Apple executives are insanely paid. Last year Tim Cook made 10 millions, which is 3x less than the CEO of Discovery channel. I am not kidding.
Funny part is that the CEO of LinkedIn makes more than twice the salary of Satya Nadella. That must make for interesting lunch meetings (oh no Satya, let me get the bill...).
Re: A Trillion Dollars (Score:2)
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Do those figures consider the enormous amount of stock Tim and Satya were gifted?
Yes. Tim Cook actual salary is around 1.7 millions. Many executive at Apple made more money than him this year but his existing stock options are worth a lot if Apple stock doesn't take a huge dive (which I predict it will within a year or two).
Amazingly at this point in time Marissa Mayer has been paid more to run Yahoo than Tim Cook has been paid to run Apple. She will also bank 100 millions from the last phase of her destruction of Yahoo while Tim Cook will only get his 300 millions in stock options if h
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You said:
The American financial sector is referred to as 'Main Street' FYI.
captcha: accuracy
Investopedia says:
While Wall Street often refers to the global finance and investment community, it is often compared and contrasted to Main Street. Main Street is often used as a metonym for individual investors, small businesses, employees and the overall economy.
Don't take it personal but I'll go with Investopedia on this one.
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Its more like Microoft these days ;)
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Long long ago, when the world was a primeval swamp, there were no computers, and no computer users.
Shortly (???) afterwards, mainframes were invented. They had hardly any software, were slow as dogs, but were better than no computer. Some people bought them, and a larger number used them. People eventually learned that the good ones came with a good operating system, and a range of peripherals.
Then, some wise guys invented the minicomputer - loads o
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Apple makes things people love. Microsoft makes things people tolerate.
That said, I don't own any Apple products. I do own some Microsoft products.