Microsoft second company to crack $2T valuation, after Apple | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft second company to crack $2T valuation, after Apple

finance.yahoo.com

72 pointsjedberg47 comments

If everyone who read this story donated $5 to Linux projects per year, it would really add up

https://www.gnome.org/donate/

https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/

https://www.debian.org/donations

I feel like if Steve were still alive, he'd be calling Bill to both congratulate him and rub in the fact that Microsoft was second after Apple.

Bill wouldn't give a fuck, he's got bigger problems right now.

Based on the documentary on Netflix and his hyper-competitiveness, I think he would care a lot.

I don't think he's care anymore. Not because of recent events, but because he stepped away from MS a long, long time ago. He's not captain of that ship anymore and MS's performance is not tied to his actions.

Much like when your child goes off to college and becomes their own person, you still care about their success and failure even if you aren't directly responsible.

Microsoft will always be his baby.

While Apple and MS have competed they're in slightly separate orthaganol spaces and cooperated initially. MS made basic for the apple 2, and office products for the original mac. I think there was some griping that MS made more for each mac sold initially than Apple did (because of the software).

Steve and Bill came to a mutually beneficial agreement in the late 90s when Steve came back to a "Beleagured" apple. MS Office on mac / internet explorer on mac and 150million dollar investment in apple. MS keep a competitor afloat for anti-trust reasons.

https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-20-what-ever-became-of-micr...

Bill and Steve were famously competitive with each other, despite ultimately ending up good friends, and despite their businesses ending up orthogonal to each other.

Interesting to note that it wasn't even 3 years ago when everyone was making a big hoo-ha about Apple crossing the 1T threshold.

The first trillion is always the hardest.

What about Saudi Aramco

I don't think Saudi Aramco counts because it's not listed in a regulated market, so it's valuation is considered suspect.

It IPOed on the Saudi exchange for 1.7T. Its not listed on a US stock exchange because they had trouble with the reporting / audit requirements. Likely it's assets are overstated.

No worth anything near to $2T. There's a reason they didn't want to get audited

Congratulations to Microsoft, this new management is killer. I wonder who will be first to reach $3T.

Apple has a $222 billion lead so far.

Tesla

Not a chance.

As it is, they're incredibly overvalued, even after their fall from almost hitting $1B. At their current market cap of ~$663B, they still have a P/E ratio of over 650. That is absolutely insane.

Perhaps that's why Michael Burry is shorting it.

He isn’t shorting it. He bought put options around the time it was added to the S&P 500 in late 2020. Probably a bet that most companies have a pop and return to trend period following addition to S&P as well as a bet that interest rates would rise which affects stocks being valued on a discounted cash flow basis.

It is a reflection of very high growth and is being valued using a discounted cash flow model based on expected future earnings. Extremely rational.

Tesla would have to increase earnings by 20x to make their current P/E rational.

And I just don't think that's realistic. At least not within the next 10 years.

Yes, my assumption is they will do that in ~5 years.

I guess, it'd be whoever that has its merger and acquisition teams in order. Microsoft has ably demonstrated the pedigree to make bold acquisitions, over its long, fabled history.

Duopolies are great things.

Apple and Microsoft mostly don't compete. Mac share of personal computers is quite small. Microsoft isn't in mobile. Apple is not really a public cloud provider (iCloud is mostly a backup service.) etc.

That is the best duopoly when instead of competing they divide the pie.

Goog ain't far behind and they compete in Microsoft's market (cloud, at least) and Apple's too.

All of the FAAMG overlap into each others' pies.

Phones: Apple, Google

Search: Google, Microsoft

Cloud: Amazon, Microsoft

Email/Business suites: Google, Microsoft

Movies/Entertainment: Apple, Amazon

Games: Microsoft, Amazon

Amazon games?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Games

Twitch, Luna, New World, etc. They're all-in.

That's two monopolies.

The great thing is that the desktop space is considered small-peanuts now. It's no longer hip or cool.

And even there, they are increasingly niche (windows for businesses and gamers, mac for video chat, web dev, and facebook moms).

I don't know of anyone above their mid 20s that uses a Mac that isn't in the tech industry, so I looked up the numbers just out of curiosity. 17.1% of users use Macs as of December 2020.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

PC gaming is huge and so is live streaming. Try watching Twitch or following any gaming or streaming community. Next to nobody is using a Mac in that scene. Microsoft actually has a few different channels on Twitch.

That's a a big valuation for a company which doesn't have a single successful product which people actually want to use. Beat that Oracle.

Windows. Office. XBox. Azure. VS Code among a ton of others

What are you talking about dude?

No one wants to use any of those products. The moment a viable competitor comes along (never), user will jump ship. You just missed his joke.

Uhhh what meatspace are you currently residing in? Xbox, Windows alone are huge indictments of what you just said. Plenty of people love the latter for example - even in the premium sector, in part because it offers a wide range of hardware compatibility and an increasingly stacked dev ecosysyem spanning .net for Windows apps on VS to web development in WSL2, etc etc. Hell, even Surface is still around, whereas Google's Pixel laptop updates have been relatively few IIRC

>> Windows.

Has anyone in the history of the earth tried any other operating system for longer than 1 week and decided to stick to Windows?

And no, vendor lock-in (e.g. games which only run on Windows) don't count... You can't use vendor lock-in as evidence of free will.

>> Office

What kind of person would use it instead of Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc... All of which are free and work just as well?

>> XBox

Do people still use that thing? I use my old one as a coffee table. There's something called a PC which does the same thing... But better.

>> Azure

Anyone started using Azure on their own free will? All the cases I ever heard about, it was because the company had some legacy systems which could only run on Windows Server. I tried it and it was a nightmare compared to Amazon AWS.

>> VS Code

There are so many simpler, more lightweight IDEs which are free. Microsoft should be paying developers to use visual studio... Oh wait, they are! Most of these developers work at Microsoft.

>> a ton of others

You mean like patent lawsuits? Surely they are Microsoft's biggest cash cow, but unfortunately, they don't count as "products" and absolutely nobody wants them.

I'm with you in sentiment - I see Microsoft as the greasy salesman of the IT world, sucking people into their ecosystem with dirty moves. They are trying to reform their image to be less like Oracle, but it is skin deep and purely self-serving.

Google is the nutty professor with no business acumen living off the profits of one good idea - advertising. The quicker they get squeezed out, the quicker the grown-ups can get back to business. Not sure whether that is a good thing yet.

Amazon is the autistic economist brother of Microsoft; continually optimizing against the boundaries of acceptable capitalism. Not evil by any deliberate choice, just aligned permanently towards maximal returns. Take it or leave it.

Apple is a fashion company which every now and then revolutionizes the consumer tech world. Since consumers hate most of the other companies and don't have any collective negotiating power, Apple reaps a big reward, then goes back to tinkering with the aesthetics.

this is hilarious, do you have a substack

>> Windows

I've tried Linux and got tired of it randomly breaking and its configuration hell, Windows is a bit more stable, also with WSL developing is easier.

>> Office

People with no internet? Saving local copies? Having a license forever instead of Google's implied threat of product killing?

>> XBox

This will probably be replaced by GamePass in the future, looking at current trends, but there is a set of people who just want to have it easy, buy a thing, and have compatible games for 5/6 years.

>> Azure

It's one the largest clouds by market cap, second to AWS, so yeah, people are using it.

>> VS Code

Open source text editor, easily extensible, works everywhere, gets frequent updates, what more could you want? You mixed it with Visual studio, which is another beast on its own.

>> Windows

I run Mac OS (M1 Air), Windows (Lenovo Yoga), and Mint (ThinkPad T420). I stick to Windows virtually all of the time. Mint is good, Windows is better. It's all subjective.

>> Office

The Google options don't come close, whether that be for performance, features, or privacy.

>> XBox

I have an XBox One. As it happens you're right, I use a PC more. But using Windows, so that only reinforces the first point.

>> Azure

Slightly more expensive than AWS but far easier to understand and use. And GCP is too limited and too likely to deprecate and/or re-version, expecting me to do the work to stop the business and upgrade rather than them maintaining some compatibility and longevity.

>> VS Code

As said elsewhere, your mention of it not being free implies you're mixed up with Visual Studio. VS Code has, by many surveys, over 50% of the IDE market - including for languages like Python and Go. It's both free and fast.

Excel will never go away.

You obviously never tried Google Sheets.

Google Sheets sucks.

me to you: "You obviously never tried to use a spreadsheet for anything actually useful"

AGGREGATE doesnt exist, INDEX and MATCH don't work properly in Google Sheets (I have a live example of it not working properly), SUBTOTAL, any of the stats functions...

Try to know what youre talking about next time, it helps

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