
Microsoft surges 8% after Morgan Stanley says it will reach $1T market cap - rbanffy
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/26/microsoft-surges-8-after-morgan-stanley-says-it-will-reach-1-trillion-market-cap/
======
tammer
My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The
odds of us _ever_ leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really
hit a powerful long-term business model.

The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We're
buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can't beat the cost
savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume
licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we'd have to pay
through the nose.

Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that
disruption will take quite a while.

~~~
endorphone
_Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo._

Windows is under enormous threat, and much of our computing now takes place on
alternate devices. The example of O365 is the perfect example, that platform
being equally usable across many platforms (because it had to to have any
market influence).

And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that
doesn't support the theory of Microsoft dominance. It is yesteryear trying to
desperately hang on to have relevance. That is not an example of why Microsoft
is a 1T company, but is an example of why the future doesn't look so hot.

~~~
bri3d
Is there real competition in the front-office / back-office "alternate
devices" space? There are certainly niche players but at least at the $bigcos
I've worked at, most "real" tasks aren't easily accomplished on a tablet,
phone, or Chromebook. Web spreadsheets tend to be feature-incomplete,
presentation and document creation is a mess, and that's not even starting in
on the hundreds of proprietary front-office tools for appointment scheduling
and client management and back-office tools for analytics and finance, which
are strongly Windows-based. I've only seen a few people use tablets day-to-day
and they're all mid-to-upper level execs whose jobs are far more delegation-
and-communication oriented and who have the liberty of sending someone an
email when they need "the numbers" pulled or a slide presentation whipped
together.

Even the BigCos I've worked at who use GSuite have had an additional
subscription to Office365 for employees who need Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
I've seen very few larger companies who can subsist on Google Sheets alone.

This could be something that changes in the next 5-10 years, certainly, but
it's been a prophecy that's underdelivered for years. Kind of feels like the
"year of Linux on the desktop" all over again.

~~~
mattferderer
I've worked with Office 365 & helped setup & admin several GSuite businesses.
GSuite is a nice light alternative. It's online Office apps seem to trump
Office 365's online Office apps but the desktop version that comes with most
Office 365 subscriptions is in a league of its own. You have to purchase
GSuite plugin after plugin to try & replace its capabilities.

~~~
bonesss
I think if you're trying to _replace_ user-facing Excel, Access, or Word usage
of a meaningful sort with anything but other specialized tool is a fools
errand.

At the same time: GSuite is leagues better, more intuitive, homogenous, more
collaborative, friendlier to sysadmins, and friendlier to document-based data
manipulation. It's also more than "good enough" for the 99% use cases of
PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Paint, etc.

GSuite for all, Thick Old Office for the accountants and data crunchers who
need it, all docs on Google Drive... why not?

O365 is kinda ok (things that should work dont, the split between online and
offline is ass, the tools are heavy, the collaboration is semi-hidden), but
it's the sharepoint and up-selling of Azure services that make it kinda Evil.
I think a hybrid approach preserves the moral high ground and best-tool-for-
the-job.

------
nly
Headline is a bit sensationalist. They closed last Friday down 6-7% on the
week and bounced back today to almost exactly where they were a week ago.

~~~
anothergoogler
A bit? MSFT is a few points below its _two week_ high!

~~~
mikeash
Nearly every article that attempts to explain the movement of a stock price is
sensationalist. There are occasional times when there is a clear cause and
effect, but usually there are a million different things going on and trying
to tie it back to a single cause is hopeless.

I notice that they are careful to phrase it in a way that does not explicitly
describe cause and effect. Here, the headline merely states that one thing
happened, then another. Any causality is inferred by the reader. But of course
the reader will infer causality, and the writers know it, and cultivate it.

------
downandout
On a somewhat unrelated note, does anybody else despise the new Techcrunch
design? I scrolled below the article for a second, then back up, and somehow I
was no longer on the MS article, but rather watching a Fitbit Versa review.

~~~
mastazi
Unfortunately it's become a common UX pattern. Bloomberg does the same, you
scroll down and now you are in a different article.

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sirjaz
What Microsoft needs to do is make UWP APIs on par with Win32 APIs. Also, the
reason why so many companies wrote custom apps for windows was because of VB.
They need to make it so that you can write code and compile it to a single
executable without the framework tacked on that is as easy and powerful as VB
was. This will get them back in the game and push them over the 1 trillion
hump.

------
paxy
Mainly because of their cloud business, which I feel is a fair evaluation.

Azure is widening the gap between 2nd and 3rd place in cloud hosting, while
also making huge gains in cloud services, which is something AWS doesn't have.

~~~
mistermann
What services does Azure have that AWS doesnt? I thought it would be the other
way around if anything.

~~~
gruez
a better web interface, for one.

~~~
tgtweak
Yeah azure has a nice interface, nicer account/subaccount management features
(Iam roles in json... Come on Amazon)

Also I find the billing pretty easy to understand.

------
throwaway84742
Are there any potential repercussions for Morgan Stanley if this is just a
pump-and-dump? Because it seems that’s what it is.

~~~
mxschumacher
this is a closely watched, public company with a market cap of $722bn. An
optimistic analyst report is not the same as some garbage ICO

~~~
throwaway84742
Sure. But when there’s such a massive movement with no change in fundamentals
just because MS said something, you can’t help but wonder. I think these large
companies do this pretty often, although rarely with such dramatic effect.

------
didip
This is just my own humble opinion.

I think whoever boosted their cloud offerings (in terms of market share) the
next few years, will reach $1T market cap first.

And it’s well within reasons for all major cloud vendors to reach $1T in a
couple years.

------
CrazyCatDog
Question: has Microsoft ever been second to the product party by more than 3
years, and won? What about on sever and tools?

Bing, windowsphone, Zune, ie, are all end-user facing failures—none of which
were based initially on in-house innovation.

My concern is with Azure, and I want to believe 1) that cloud is not winner
take all and 2) that microsoft won’t fatally trip over itself as it tries to
learn what the market wants.

Please help me with fodder to form my own opinion on whether Azure can ever be
more than a bundled tie-in (Azure sales ~= Azure utilization) like our old
friend Sharepoint.

~~~
PeterStuer
Excel when Visicalc and Lotus 123 were king Word when WordPerfect was the
standard

~~~
pjmlp
All of them helped by compention own mistakes.

Excel started on Mac and as ported to Windows afterwards.

Visicalc was never ported to Windows, while Lotus never managed the transition
in a good way.

WordPerfect was the king of wordprocessors in text based OSes, took too long
to accept the world had gone GUI and was quite arrogant to their customers.
There is even a book about its downfall, " Almost Perfect".

Sometimes Microsoft does not need to make too much effort, when their
competition is good killing their own jewels.

~~~
PeterStuer
True. It is fairly hard to unsettle an incumbent defacto 'standard' that
doesn't make mistakes.

------
gigatexal
MS should make windows free and just charge for services. I’d love it if they
made SQLServer free (sans support or add paid support that actually is good
not outsourced) too but that’s a pipe dream.

~~~
tcarn
Pretty close to free for me, $5 month basic sql server to play around with
(only 2 gigs of data though). Wish they would make it free...

~~~
lev99
Mssql is significantly more expensive to run than postgres, Mongo, dynmodb, or
mysql when you need a real sql server. This is true for both self hosted and
cloud solutions.

Dynmodb in AWS offers 25gb free. That's twelve times the storage without
charging you a dime.

~~~
philliphaydon
Dynamo db is not cheap at all. Writes are expensive and the structure of
Dynamo is far from flexible and very limited in regards to querying. I don’t
know what the usecase is for it.

~~~
lev99
>usecase

Dynamo db handles burst traffic (scaling up and down on server count) better
than mssql. Dynamo also handles big data better than sql.

The last time I tried (2015) no amount of indexing or sharding was allowing
for decent performance on joins across tables with 300+ million rows in sql
server. I've seen dynmodb used in map reduce functions with more data.

Dynamo also doesn't completely suck at typical transcational work, and it's
convient to have one datasource across the warehouse and application layers.

~~~
philliphaydon
When I worked in Australia we had a client with ~1.5tb database in SQL Server,
largest main table was about 2.5b records. Had no problem returning joined
records in low ms times. Wouldn't be good if it had really high traffic but we
wrote about ~1-2m records per day into the tables without issue reading it
out.

SQL Server can perform. But requires a lot of massaging.

\---

We tried using DynamoDB for logging, not sure why but the team had trouble
with document sizes, write limits, in the end it was growing and going to cost
more than SQL Server, was replaced with logging to PostgreSQL with much more
flexibilty and runs on a t2.micro instance without issue.

------
olivermarks
The bigger question in my mind is whether MSFT will reach a $1T market cap
because it is essentially behaving like a banker and moving money around, or
whether it will genuinely innovate to expand its revenue. If it is the former
they are vulnerable to their souffle collapsing. The typical hypey techcrunch
headline belies the fact that MSFT is reapproaching where it was two weeks ago
in the markets.

~~~
tomnipotent
> essentially behaving like a banker and moving money around

Modern GAAP makes this impossible to hide thanks to Enron (shuffling cash
between subsidiaries).

~~~
olivermarks
I suspect they are emulating Apple. 2:45 of Rana Faroohar in 2016 on Apple &
capital markets [https://youtu.be/-lt5xCFq-RA](https://youtu.be/-lt5xCFq-RA)

~~~
tomnipotent
Thank you, this was the context I was missing. I'd be curious what the
requirements are for public companies to report gains from these types of
investments.

------
singhrac
Is there any chance Microsoft will take a strong stance on privacy like Apple?
They seem to have strong business models besides ads so they can avoid
becoming a data grubbing pile of crap.

~~~
tallanvor
They sued the government to keep from handing over customer data stored
overseas. Isn't that a pretty strong stance on privacy?

They could certainly strengthen their stance in some areas, though, such as by
including Bitlocker in all versions of Windows and using strong E2E encryption
in Skypep. But I'm not sure that the majority of people would use Bitlocker
anyway.

~~~
casefields
That's not even close to the same. Windows 10 is the spying king:
[http://bgr.com/2016/02/10/windows-10-spying-
investigation/](http://bgr.com/2016/02/10/windows-10-spying-investigation/)

Did you forget about Prism?
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-
nsa-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-
collaboration-user-data)

------
spiderPig
MSFT should go the other way of Google now and offer full data privacy
guarantees(I guess they still have a big Bing Ads business though).

That being said, It's scary how big these MegaCorps have gotten.

~~~
romanovcode
I actually don't get the data-hogging of Microsoft, their ad revenue is only
~7% (compared to ~88% at Google).

Would be much better if they would follow Apple model and ditch advertising
altogether and focus on products and privacy.

------
pmarreck
[Comment deleted because I'm mainly just angry at Microsoft for literally 20
years now.]

~~~
ianai
Agreed. But it’s every major player in tech. I wish the political desire to
regulate markets existed. We have these huge corporations, and few else. They
just don’t employ enough people, and their products leave people wanting.

As far as seeing anyone sunset, I don’t. But I do hope to see the end to
homelessness and needless brutalism.

~~~
pmarreck
ooof. way to make me feel bad. hold out for successful universal income
experiments, I guess

~~~
ianai
Oh, I don’t mean that toward you. I mean all the hostility and associated
violence in the world wret large

