Microsoft surges 8% after Morgan Stanley says it will reach $1T market cap
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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.
Solved problem on iOS and Android with whatever mail app you want to use, but those are of course apps.
Solved problem on the PC with Outlook or "Gmail Offline", but "Gmail Offline" is a chrome-only feature so is, as far as I'm concerned, an offline email client built into Chrome, not a feature of Gmail per-se. See also: Any IMAP mail client.
So now that we’ve removed the need for an arbitrary client in both cases why can’t localStorage/etc solve this to most users satisfaction?
If we were using GSuite I guess we could use the Gmail API to get the message body data, but at the end of the day having local access is just more convenient (edit: faster).
Edit: for everything else that is not email (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) there are also similar advantages related to having full fledged desktop applications.
The ability to open a million line csv file with 75 columns and execute a search and replace without leaking battery acid out of every orifice in your machine.
The hundreds of long complex well vetted plug ins that are drop and play with Excel which serve niche hard to reason about corners of regulation legalese. There has been so much cross pollination between the major firms that everybody has these tools and implements their own little tweaks.
The ability to quickly spin up a VBA macro to do some heavy lifting in a client provided 250 worksheet workbook each with 50000 line items (none escape quoted so every address with a comma in it malformed the data on client export).
I have 32g of memory and a SSD on this machine. If I attempt to open a 1,000,000 .csv file, add a filter at the top, and attempt to filter by a column, my computer is done. LibreOffice will go gray and never recover no matter how long it is left. Eventually it will crash. Do the same in Excel and it will successfully search the column and return just the line items with said column.
That example is egregious as well. LibreOffice can not handle 500,000 line items files with 30 text heavy columns. It crashes on numerous basic spreadsheet operations, however Excel handles them (and quickly).
I am not a Microsoft shill, I'm running open source from Linux to Ruby/Rust and all the way down to Postgres. I would love nothing more than to stop having to keep a second windows machine setup next to me just to handle large csv files.
If LO would just make .xlsx a native format, they could probably take some market share from Excel. But, as long as there are little issues with interoperability, 100% of the world will be on Excel. Alas.
We switched from o365 to gsuite in the last year, and have run into some things that make it feel like gsuite isn’t quite polished as a business product. Examples off the top of my head:
- Can’t share individual folders from a team drive. Not a dealbreaker, but hobbles g drive as a Dropbox replacement.
- Email to a suspended user bounces. In exchange, the mail goes through but access is cut off.
- inviting a google group to a meeting doesn’t work as smoothly as inviting an exchange group
- can’t delegate account access administratively, need to do it from the user account
There are big pluses too, and overall I’m not sad we switched. But it feels like MS has a much better handle on what corporate IT needs.
Fit a polynomial trendline to a chart.
Choose the number of decimal places when showing a trendline's equation. Copy that equation, without re-typing it yourself.
Apply the solver to a nonlinear-but-continuously-differentiable system of equations.
You know, the stuff I could do in Office '95 on a 120MHz Pentium.
gsuite is cool for a couple hundred people, when you dont want to pay for office licenses for everyone. it makes even less sense when you already do. there is a serious productivity delta between gsuite and o365, especially if you are like 90% of the other companies where Excel is king (no, sheets is not a suitable stand-in).
(I'm a Google engineer)
It's not a bad suite, I just think it's confused on some areas (don't even get me started on the chat/conference systems tho)
IF neither, Gsuite is ok.
Most of them use iPhones too.
It's used very technically and often by people who don't view themselves as technically capable so the lock-in is enormous.
Not to mention that you can't do 1/4 of what Excel can do in sheets without writing a googleScript. Don't even try to open a 100 column 1,000,000 row spreadsheet (which are more common than most think) in Sheets.
Actually there is one more possibility, that one or more goofballs in accounting just like to waste time "looking over the numbers and getting a feel for them". This generates lots of spurious questionably-motivated inquiries to business and IT people (who always blame the other party, when only accounting is to blame for their own vague feelings). In that case don't worry about fixing anything at the company, just get a different job somewhere else.
That said, there are some great cloud analytics offerings which are going to compete.
I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.
Drain those IT projects of risk, get moving early, with a structure that lets the user guide the data modelling... Could be a nice local minimum :)
Nowadays you have JS to automate Google and MS docs, but 1) Javascript is kinda warty for VBA-type users, 2) API driven javascript is less friendly than the locally-logical VBA-style access, and 3) the mental barriers to entry are much higher than older solutions to the same issues...
In theory we should be approaching data-nirvana for end users. In reality it takes a lot of tech know how to bridge those gaps in the modern Enterprise and you're getting almost no help from the big boys.
I've worked—at Google—extensively on documents using Google Docs on a Chromebook and the experience is pretty smooth.
That annoys me the most.
We get Office + email for just a hair more than we pay now, and we don't have to deal with the dinks at Rackspace when we have issues with it. I'm sure Microsoft support isn't perfect, but why go through a middleman.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/support-options-for-b...
Professional Support Single Incident $499 USD for one incident
Professional Support 5-Pack $1999 USD for five incidents
Usually when you buy a product the company supports it without additional fees.
I love my iPad for entertainment but I can't imagine doing any real work on an iPad.
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.
Microsoft has always discounted everything for volume licensing. That's how they lock you in.
If management is choosing a Document vendor, one of which is offering cheaper OS licensing in order to lock the purchaser into a treadmill of neverending consultant fees and half-baked integration work where the vendor will constantly push unrelated services and licensing to fix their own products because of walled gardens obscured by lacking technical and business competence on the part of the purchaser, we're talking MS. It's a highly successful strategy, but it undermines their customers and has left a sour taste in many a mouth.
I don't know if Embrace, Extend, Extinguish counts as a "sinister plot"... I can't say I'm the most competent here to speak to what lies in the heart of "marketing" or "sales" people, much less at a giant like MS... I can say that the sellers I know would gleefully participate in sinister plots if it meant a better office and parking space.
1. more than the competition - gouging! Those bastards!
2. same as the competition - collusion! Those bastards!
3. less than the competition - locking people in! Those bastards!
On the other hand, there is no comparable suite of software that competes with Microsoft office on more than just the basics.
But the reality is that for a 100% single-vendor, integrated system that works well with everything that's already installed in an SMB or larger, there are no competitors for O365.
Back when I was doing SMB consulting gigs, I tried to steer a few folks away from it, because I think it's a bad long-term move to rely on too many services from a single vendor, and especially when those are all off-premises services that depend on a lot of working technology between you and the vendor. But, it became clear before long that I was giving bad advice. The clients that ignored me and went with O365 were happier, and when something went wrong, they just shrugged and said, "oh well, Microsoft will fix it soon."
Whereas if something went wrong with any other system, it was my fault because I recommended it, even if I couldn't do anything about whatever particular piece was broken.
Anyway, point is, every customer that signs up for O365 at any price is going to be a Microsoft customer for a very long time, and I don't see anybody on the horizon that is going to be changing anyone's mind about it.
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.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-sui...
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/sorry_microsoft_hat...
If anything, such a large migration from software suite to another is most likely very rare. So probably begs the question why would a company do something like this if there isn't obvious benefit of doing this.
Since I haven't used Microsoft products in a long time, I can't tell gsuite is vastly superior, other than very specialized edge cases for excel and word. For most people, it probably is more than good enough and not worth the extra money or (presumably) worse user experience.
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.
Automated Google Sheet reports, easy to maintain organizational documentation.
One was acquired by a S&P 509 and forced to convert to O365. The CFO quietly carved out an exception in the budget citing "conversion costs" so Accounting and Sales don't have to convert.
Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over.
I think the automation and Enterprise document management story in GSuite is just better than the Sharepoint nightmare and heavyweight knowledge-graph approach of O365. I think going over to O365 would be a lot harder than the opposite, for an advanced user, thanks to how automation works on those platforms...
Correct and in this case, that was exactly what happened except with the GSuite benefiting.
There was a number of Google Sheets that were automatically populated by database queries on an hourly basis. These were regularly viewed by the L1s (such as daily orders, distribution statistics, accounting summaries) and the Sales team (who wanted to know their commissions ASAP daily).
Then you had a bunch of managers who used those sheets to do light analysis with macro magic.
I have been thinking would this means the return of Desktop. The combination of Desktop + Tablet, instead of Laptop.
What an incredibly misguided comment.
Microsoft is a major player in the business software market, and there's no sign that will change anytime soon.
Sure, Windows is not a growth center, but it's still a huge business and will continue to be for several years. Meanwhile Office 365 is adequately protecting their productivity business, and Azure is growing at an enormous rate.
Most importantly, Microsoft has a massive home advantage when selling to businesses. They are the masters of cross-selling, and unlike consumer companies like Google, they know how to compete in markets without winner-takes-all outcomes (enterprise buyers, unlike consumers, know how to play vendors against each other to limit lock-in).
As long as they deliver good enough products, it will be very hard to uproot them.
What it is not is a Netflix, Amazon, Facebook or Google.
Gsuite may be lightweight now but it’s only a few years away from feature creep with PMs pushing their shit and making it a bloated mess.
You strangely follow this by essentially supporting my comment.
This whole conversation is a bit surreal, in a way, because we've been having it for literally a decade while Microsoft stagnates and becomes less and less important in this industry, a bit like IBM. The absolutely domination that Microsoft held in the late-90s to early-00s is something that is seems many in here are blissfully unaware. I remember desperately getting those technet early release discs to try to get a headstart on whatever Microsoft was doing next. Now...who cares? Like literally, Microsoft initiatives that are anything more than "yup, still selling that thing we got some entrenchment in a decade ago...and if we go outside of the lines even a bit it will spell doom" just fizzles. Remember when Exchange/MAPI integration was Microsoft's beachhead? BOOM. Then it was Office, but Microsoft had to rebuild Office to work on virtually every device or they would have had a mass exodus. Windows CE/Windows Mobile...all the Microsoft pull in the world was worth exactly nothing.
Now, astonishingly few shops are actually making Windows apps. In-house development is overwhelmingly web apps, or even Android/iOS. People have mentioned contact management, scheduling, etc -- all overwhelmingly web and mobile apps, or at a minimum cross-platform.
In the financial world the entire next generation of platforms are cross-platform or web-based. No one is pinning anything on Microsoft.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by any measure -- I'm typing this on Windows 10 right now -- and the various fanboy "boooo, stop hating on M$" type replies are boorish. It's just a completely different world, and Microsoft is another IBM now.
There is a wide spectrum between "absolute domination" (your strawman) and "desperately trying to stay relevant" (your argument).
> Microsoft is another IBM now
Only someone with very little actual experience of the business software market would make such a claim.
I said that Microsoft is fighting to stay relevant, which is most certainly in contrast to their once position of domination. These statements are supporting, not in conflict. There is no fallacy.
>Only someone with very little actual experience of the business software market would make such a claim.
I guess.
They're the worlds largest software company by both sales and profit.
They're also the world's most valuable software company and the third most valuable company period.
If this is what qualifies as fighting to stay relevant, there are only a few companies in world history that have ever been relevant.
Microsoft certainly has potential. Their AI research and offerings are right up there next to Google's. Combining AI with SQL and Office could enable some real productivity advances. Microsoft is also top notch at PC gaming, a significant consumer niche.
But I think Microsoft also has one rather big problem that is currently masked by their Azure growth rates. That problem is Windows. I think Windows may be in permanent decline.
I know this sounds far fetched given the seemingly unassailable dominance of Windows on corporate desktops. It's indispensible for a very wide array of tasks right now. No need to reiterate all of them.
But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS (as well as some Mac and Chrome OS in the US). Where it's still being used for personal computing it's often as a mere host for a web browser with the added benefit of a physical keyboard.
Windows has effectively lost the generation that will shape corporate environments in the years and decades to come, and that has the potential to erode both Office and their server-side offerings. Windows is losing share everywhere, even on Azure.
It's one thing to talk an entreched Windows shop into using Azure. They certainly get some impressive growth numbers out of it. But it's quite a different challenge for Microsoft to sell to people who went from school through university using iOS or Android, collaborating via Google Docs and Google Drive for free. It's going to be a very hard sell for Microsoft.
There is an avalanche of these folks that's going to hit corporate environments in the coming years. They have no attachment to Microsoft and they have zero tolerance for Microsoft's obscure sales language and licensing terms.
No they haven't. As evidence - there is an avalanche of young gamers and streamers using Windows. Almost every streamer and gamer using Twitch.tv are on Windows. Watch the programming streams - it's almost exclusively done on Windows.
Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well. Throw a stone and you'll hit one. I bought a car the other day and everyone on the sales floor and in their finance office is running Windows. My wife is a teacher and guess what they use in their administrative offices and guess what every teacher uses to get email?
Every insurance shop I've seen runs Windows. Every call center I've ever seen runs Windows. Every sales office I've ever seen runs Windows, even in industries such as publishing where the Mac is popular.
> But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS.
I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption. People who need to work at home aren't using Android and iOS. My brother in law works for a big financial house. When he works at home, he isn't using Android or iOS. Same with my sister in law who works for a big insurance company.
> They have no attachment to Microsoft [people who went from school through university using iOS or Android]...
New employees don't start off by being able to change whatever they want. Furthermore, they will learn more on the job than they did in school. If they simply cannot find alternatives to things that need to be done on Windows, they'll use Windows and other Microsoft tools. And finally, I doubt anyone makes it through university using only iOS and Android.
I'd like to see some evidence for your claims.
That's a niche. Most games are played on mobile these days. Just look at the sales numbers of gaming PCs. I did mention gaming by the way, so yes that is an area of hope for Microsoft, but it's small.
>Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well.
Absolutely, and I said as much. But being entrenched doesn't necessarily make you relevant.
It's not a safe bet that anyone would choose to build anything new on Microsoft tech just because the insurance sales guy still has his Windows laptop or because everyone logs into the corporate network via AD.
Microsoft knows that. It's why they scramble to diversify away from Windows. They want us to use Azure. They want us to use their AI. They want us to use Office. They don't want to get dragged down by Windows, and I think Satya Nadella is doing a great job executing this strategy. But I also think the most difficult phase in this transition away from Windows is still ahead of us and it's not going to be easy.
>I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption.
You do have a point there, but the things we do with computers and networks have changed. Even consumption requires a lot of computing, just not on the end user's device.
When I do research as part of my work I use Google and sometimes Duckduckgo. There's a lot of computing going on, but it's mostly done on some Linux server.
Even most line of business apps are now web based (with important exceptions). As a share of all computing that is done to keep a business running, I bet that even the most entrenched Windows shops now use less Windows specific tech than they used to.
Microsoft IIS has maintained close to 30% of public Web servers and that’s not even counting intranet servers where IIS likely has a majority market share.
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2016/02/22/february-2016-...
Microsoft is relevant. They are fighting to stay relevant because the future is, in every way, moving against them. Yes, they are fantastically profitable on the inertia they achieved in prior decades, exactly like IBM was. If Microsoft doesn't gain a lot of relevance they going to eventually hit exactly the same sort of curve.
I mean...their revenue has stagnated for half a decade now.
Have you ever been to Twitch.tv? It's perhaps the biggest thing in gaming right now and guess what desktop OS everybody runs there if they're not running a console?
Oh and if they are running a console, guess what half of those consoles are?
But yes, lots of people game on Windows. Lots of people have Windows installed. You seem to think that is a counterpoint, and I daresay it comes from a terribly naive perspective.
That one of the top three companies in the world is struggling to stay relevant is ridiculous really.
Office "needs" Sharepoint. Lots of Sharepoint and automation "needs" BizTalk. Neither of these are practically made to be customer managed, both require armies of external (MS partnered...), consultants.
This implicit subscription to supplier monotheism undermines correct business decisions and creates economic impedence against correct business action. Sharecropping has never been a good fit for businesses who need to lead.
Like Microsoft 365, which is a superset of Office 365, and includes Windows licensing for desktops, along with the other "nice to haves" from the Azure AD premium suite, like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and the Enterprise Mobility suite stuff. Oh, and an OMA DM compliant MDM suite with DLP and ...
I work in this space, and it seems like the "365" suite is rapidly becoming an incredibly well integrated kitchen-sink approach to end-users software & devices.
Microsoft is its own worst enemy - Windows usability has been going down the drain in recent years (is it possible that the desktop has been neglected due to the new emphasize on enterprise and the cloud?), and people get used to alternative OS's via Android.
Some people do use Google tools on the side, using personal accounts for collaborating on documents (presentations, docs). They don’t necessarily know the organization was using them before, it’s like they’re bringing them inside as a new tool.
Many exchange many MS Office words via e-mail (using desktop email clients).
People use WeTransfer for sharing files internally or with contractors.
People used to use Google Drive for sharing static files and it seems that this shared drive usage stopped and that people are not using OneDrive, relying on email and wetransfer.
(I would not be surprised if some team Slack exist somewhere or I’m pretty sure many use their Facebook messengers to send quick links and references)
As far as I know, the only consistently used Office365 tools are Mail and Calendar.
Office365 doesn’t seem to induce the same collaborative patterns that Google Drive induce at all.
Mostly it feels communication and collaboration are like 10 years or more ago:
email is king, versioning is absent, and people use external tools when they feel it’s quicker and better (at odd with the organization policies of course)
PS: I’ll add that all of my students are used to Google Drive tools, using Docs and Presentations regularly. It grew progressively over the year, and now it’s very rare to encounter a student who never used Google Drive.
I teach to 150+ students each year, so I’d say it’s representative of a new wave of professionals who take real-time collaborative tools for granted (and will be sorely disappointed by tools and process in the organizations they’re about to join)
They also seem to invest pretty heavily in making in a developer platform so you can extend it. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph
(and as you can see from the picture of the developer it is very hip)
Smart move. Microsoft has a proven track record of long term commitment to products. Google has a proven track record of not being committed to products.
Gmail, first release 2004.
Google docs, first release 2006.
Not too bad?
Google Code Search was another notable casualty and many others.
Now, one can point to Microsoft's web authoring efforts having cancelled a number of products(Frontpage etc) as well as cancelling Silverlight, VB6 etc etc.
Still MS Office Suite seems significantly more important to Microsoft than Google Docs is to Google.
O365 includes desktops app, so they are probably using Word, Excel and powerpoint already
The hammer can come down any time though.
Everything makes sense. If it doesn't, it's because you are missing something.
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.
Everyday on bloomberg, cnbc, etc, they said "the dow or some stock" is down for X reason but that's nonsense. If the talking heads at bloomberg, cnbc, etc knew the reasons for daily stock/market moves, then they wouldn't be working as journalists. They'd be making bank on wall street.
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.
Also I find the billing pretty easy to understand.
Better than it use to be, so I'll give them that, atleast they are always improving.
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.
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.
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.
SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. If they didn't have it, they bought a company that did have it - and then used their 800lbs of brute market muscle to make it into the dominant offering.
Dynmodb in AWS offers 25gb free. That's twelve times the storage without charging you a dime.
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.
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.
You will not be prompt to activate it and it will not ever lock itself. Only thing you cannot do is change your "Personalisation Settings" e.g. remove stupid "recomendations" on your Start, change desktop background etc.. Also you will have small overlay on bottom left corner saying "Windows is not activated" or smth.
Modern GAAP makes this impossible to hide thanks to Enron (shuffling cash between subsidiaries).
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.
Did you forget about Prism? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
That being said, It's scary how big these MegaCorps have gotten.
Would be much better if they would follow Apple model and ditch advertising altogether and focus on products and privacy.
In fact, I care about being able to keep my data private and be able to use my services independently. As long as that is possible I am okay with Microsoft/Google/Amazon selling others their golden cloud services. It is more a live and let live attitude.
As far as seeing anyone sunset, I don’t. But I do hope to see the end to homelessness and needless brutalism.