
Microsoft’s Q4 earnings and 2020 expectations - reallydontask
https://windowsreport.com/microsofts-q4-earnings/
======
asdfman123
I'm a .NET developer and I'm very pleased with the direction the tech stack is
heading, but man. Microsoft Teams is _so much worse_ than Slack.

The UI is so much less intuitive, but worse, they haven't figured out
scrolling. I can't scroll quickly through chat history -- it's always loading
-- meaning it's much harder to get the information I want. On the other hand,
maybe Slack takes up so much memory because it pre-loads everything.

But even more damningly, there are fewer emojis. Sometimes there is no emoji
for what I am feeling.

~~~
WorldMaker
Huh, I didn't even realize Teams had a custom emoji picker. I've been mostly
using the Windows emoji keyboard in teams, which gives you the full Unicode
emoji set, and now kaomoji, at the press of Win+. or Win+; (whichever is more
convenient on your keyboard layout)

~~~
tracker1
LOL, coolest thing I've learned today... didn't know windows even had an emoji
picker built in.

------
fortran77
There's an odd bubble on HN where people are so deep into their Linux or Mac
universes that they think Microsoft has faded into obscurity, when in fact
they're the strongest tech company around.

~~~
endorphone
What a lot of people here do think is that Microsoft has lost the _technology
leadership_ role that they once had. I've been programming for two+ decades,
and there was a time when Microsoft could allude to something and the entire
industry would race to try to not be left behind. A lot of people on here are
too young to remember this, but it cannot be overstated how absolutely
dominant Microsoft was in tech. Their earnings were much less, but their
influence was absolute, and those technet and MSDN discs were the holy
information conduit for the industry.

Now...the company has its corner, but that's it. They provide a lot of
valuable products that obviously make them a tonne of money, and they've been
executing fantastically, but if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never
touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is
talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.

IBM created the PC, and was influential in a lot of critical areas. Now they
are just...there. They make revenue pushing up towards Microsoft levels, but
you can safely completely ignore them.

~~~
wvenable
> Now...the company has its corner, but that's it.

Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They
have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development
tools.

> if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft
> product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing,
> you're probably perfectly fine doing that.

The interesting thing now is that you can be a Linux or Mac developer and
actually be able to use many Microsoft products. VS code is my favorite editor
or any platform (actually I use it more on Linux than on Windows). I'm working
on a project right now in .NET that will run as well on a Raspberry Pi as it
does on Windows.

I think that the market _grown_ so significantly that no company is ever going
to have the tech leadership that Microsoft had in the 90's and early 2000's.
But I think Microsoft is positioning themselves to great things after fumbling
though the last 5-10 years.

~~~
endorphone
By corner I didn't mean niche. I meant that they're a vendor at the market,
they aren't the vendor, or a central vendor. You might go over and peruse
their wares, or maybe you won't.

"They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine,
development tools."

IBM did exactly the same thing.

And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise
sales of Office and Windows. They make money on exactly the same things they
made money on 20 years ago, but the pie is so much bigger they make a lot more
of it.

~~~
wvenable
> I meant that they're a vendor at the market, they aren't the vendor, or a
> central vendor.

Depends. In corporate environments, which is still a massive market, they
_are_ the central vendor. At it seems they're actually making even more
headway there. Microsoft hasn't really _lost_ influence, it's just the market
is so much bigger now that influence isn't total. And they're making in-roads
in those other markets.

Microsoft missed out on mobile but that's a new market rather than a loss of
their existing market. And now that's a growth opportunity for them.

> IBM did exactly the same thing.

I think you're point is to say that Microsoft is the new IBM but I don't think
that follows. IBM has always been IBM even when they owned much more of the
market. Even Microsoft hated working with them.

> And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise
> sales of Office and Windows.

Less than 50% now (see my other comment).

~~~
ethbro
Presumably 1st gen IBM wasn't such a punchline.

Most of their dysfunction seems to be driven by monetizing legacy products,
but there was a time when they didn't _have_ any legacy products.

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tootie
MS has a really appealing mix of business and IT pro products and they've been
very clever in how they tie O365, Azure and VSTS together from a marketing
perspective. That being said, while all their products are "fine" I don't
really love any of them and a few downright suck. O365 was miserable failure
at my last shop. It's so bloated with features, that it becomes slow and
unusable. They have nothing that Google or Amazon don't do better. I'd also
say that between the three of them, I haven't seen a single decent
professional services rep.

~~~
reallydontask
O365 is an interesting one.

We were using G-Suite at my previous place, which was on a hiring spree of
sales and marketing guys/gals, and pretty much everybody that came in said
they'd rather have MS products.

Are they better? Maybe, Maybe not. I can almost guarantee that G-suite covered
most of their needs but they were just used to MS products and it was easier
to bite the bullet and use MS that hear them gripe continuously.

Lost productivity has a cost too

FWIW, I think G-Suite is probably good enough for 80-90% of users.

~~~
qaq
prob outlook is hard to replace with gmail for their workflows

~~~
sushisource
I'd guess that. Gmail has maybe 10% of the features Outlook does. I really
dislike it as an email service, especially since they've killed Inbox which at
least made it a bit more tolerable.

------
valleyjo
It doesn’t make sense to me that Satya Nadella makes 10x less than Sundar
Pichai. Last I saw Satya made about 20M and Sundar was making 200M. Given
Microsoft performance vs google I don’t get it.

~~~
phkahler
Why does anyone make 200M at a publicly owned company?

~~~
valleyjo
Don’t know. Seems absurd to me. There’s no way Sundar contributes 10x more
value. Or anything even close to 200M IMO

~~~
noahl
Are you suggesting that Google try to poach Satya Nadella? :) I would give a
lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

~~~
fhbdukfrh
Not saying it could never happen, but in addition to being the architect of a
renaissance at one of the biggest, must well-known companies in the world,
Satya is also a mcrosoftie from pretty much birth. I think it would take a lot
more than gobs of money to make him jump.

------
Pandabob
I'd be interested in hearing HN's experiences about Azure and how it stacks up
against AWS and GCP.

What I've been seeing in enterprise settings is that companies that are
already using Windows Virtual Desktops feel more comfortable using Azure vs
the competition.

~~~
michannne
From using both, my recommendation is AWS for anything Node-based, Azure for
anything else. GCP is severely lacking to both and has never struck me as a
serious contender, but maybe there are industries that benefit from the
simplicity.

I like the control AWS gives you, but it is overwhelming at times. On Azure,
everything feels easier to find, and there is not such a steep learning curve.
I can set up a site, a repo, my CI/CD pipeline, and a DB within minutes,
complete with qa, staging and production deployment cycles, telemetry, and
alerts. The reason I wouldn't recommend Node-based deployments with this flow
is because Visual Studio and VSTS does not play well with node, feels like it
is constantly fighting you to use anything but Node, but for a project in
React and an ASP Net Core server, it's incredibly seamless.

Meanwhile on AWS, I feel like the control of VMs is a lot better to control.
It is more intuitive to set up load balancing schemes on AWS, and the CDN
makes just enough more sense than Azure CDN to make me prefer it, but it can't
beat the productivity gains I have in Azure, though I feel I just don't have
the right use cases to benefit from whatever imrpovements AWS offers.

All in all, at this point, you don't lose by choosing either AWS or Azure,
other than spending time to learn how AWS services are integrates and what
parts of the ecosystem is relevant, so I am not surprised MS is benefiting
greatly from Azure.

~~~
fernandotakai
GCP's kubernetes solution is light-years ahead of azure's and AWS'.

~~~
michannne
I agree but in the industries where I've worked there were never needs to use
Kubernetes or Docker or any container-based solution.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Funnily enough, I just recently started at a place that's all in on Docker +
Kubernetes and they're 100% on GCP.

------
nolok
These numbers are great, with one caveat: the Teams thing. Several place I
work or consult for use Office 365, not for its web app but for its desktop
app (pay a fixed sum per month per user, and get access to the latest version
word/excel, which is great).

As any user of this product can attest, for a couple of months now, Teams has
been pushed through the Office 365 updater, causing it to

1\. install by itself (even though I consider it a separate product, but hey
it's not strictly evil just yet, at least I can understand that it get
installed, just like say Publisher even though the user may not use it it's
part of the suite's single installer)

2\. Open a nag screen after boot that mixes up Teams and your Office 365
account and keep doing it until the users make a Teams account, usually linked
to his Office 365 account. Ignoring and closing it is not enough, as it will
nag you after every reboot until you pleases it with an offrand of
registration.

That one is pure freaking evil because either I get called to deal with it
(which is a total waste of my time and my customer's money), or people deal
with it on their own and end up with each their own account for which they
won't remember the password and will forever claim that "no I didn't create it
I've never seen that before".

3\. If you uninstall Teams, there is a separate tool that gets installed
behind your back, called "Teams Machine Wide installer", that will reinstall
it without asking and you will be nagged after reboot again. As you can guess
from the name, it's not normal Office 365 behavior, it's specific for Teams,
and it's separate from the Teams install itself.

To the product manager that let this thing happen: seriously, screw you. O365
installer used to be super clear and trustworthy, and now you've ruined it.
Don't push auto-reinstall behind the admin's back.

So yeah, when it says

> It also has had a great year with Teams and has shown real momentum. Teams
> now claims 13 million users, 30% more than Slack

I think those numbers are complete bullshit, and if anything they're
disapointing. Teams may or may not be a great tool, but the way Office users
are being turned into Teams users without them really asking for it only to
then claim a high number of users doesn't inspire any confidence to me.

Beside that, I'm a massive user of Microsoft's products, have been for a long
time, and the great results are deserved on all front (as long as you give
Windows 10 a pass of "O&O ShutUp 10" to remove the layer of crapware)

~~~
partiallypro
The Teams number is DAU, not active installs. So your comment doesn't really
hold much water.

~~~
nolok
If they created an account after the nag screen then Team is launched,
relaunch automatically at start, with a connected account. Not sure if they
count it as DAU, but they probably could.

Also, if they're not doing this to cheat their number so it's even worse, the
primary point of my comment was about the crap they're pulling, not the effect
it may have on their numbers.

------
antome
One thing Microsoft has really nailed, is the location diversity of Azure
datacenters. They have multiple locations in South Africa and UAE, while also
having regions in multiple cities across Australia, Japan and India. If I
wanted to launch a worldwide product, why would I want to go with AWS, Google
or IBM?

~~~
ps101
Genuinely asking as I don't work in that space - what's the advantage of this
location diversity?

~~~
me_again
Many cloud customers have regulatory or business requirements that their data
be held within particular regions or national boundaries. It should also help
somewhat with latency, though in most cases CDN points of presence will be
more critical.

~~~
october_sky
Except, those regulatory or business requirements also have business
continuity and disaster recovery requirements from those same regulators, and
Azure's region design is far inferior than alternatives.

------
raylangivens
MSFT employee here, Teams sucks balls. I have only barely used Slack but when
I joined the company everyone was using SfB which blew dead goats.

Teams is much better than that. But the search is bad, I agree on scrolling,
its atrocious. But man, I have a big gripe with search. Never do I get the
results I want. People search is even worse. Adding a new person to chat with
somehow takes more clicks than necessary. It will only show a limited number
of people whom you conversed with when you scrolled down.

The higher MAU numbers are just because it comes pre-packaged with O365
subscription. Difficult to discern how much traction it would get if it stood
on its own.

My 2 cents.

------
SECProto
So does Q4 for Microsoft refer to April-June? And does 2020 refer to calendar
year 2020 or business year? I find that somewhat confusing, and the article
doesn't expand on it at all.

~~~
mikestew
I can’t imagine fiscal year starting July 1 has changed since I worked there
and paid attention to such things. Can’t help on whether TFA refers to fiscal
or calendar 2020.

------
alexashka
The last line in the article I found intriguing: 16 billion spent on R&D?

That's a lot... What are they so actively researching?

~~~
jongalloway2
There's a pretty good overview of the research areas here:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/)

There's also a Microsoft Research podcast with interviews here:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/blog/category/podca...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/blog/category/podcast/)

A lot of stuff you'd expect like AI, ML, HCI, cloud computing, security, but
also stuff like acoustics, social media impacts of computing, biology and
medicine, etc.

------
sidcool
Microsoft's R&D spending is staggeringly high!

~~~
codesforhugs
They do a serious amount of pure research. If you haven't before, it's
interesting to browse [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research) and see just how broad
it is.

------
d--b
Isn't Q4 in the future? Have I missed 6 months?

~~~
jumbopapa
Their fiscal year runs from July - June

------
pastor_elm
>In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further
differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire
platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of
ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software)

What's so profitable about these areas? I see them as a potential black hole.

~~~
microtherion
> we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further
> differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML

And this would be "differentiation" because MS is so well known for their
AI/ML, or because none of the other tech giants are active in this space?

