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Comment by joak | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft was once on the decline and it's now bouncing back. Having billions and captive markets (by network effect) seems to help.

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Microsoft did decline. Windows, office MSFT mobile and Xbox have either stagnated at the top or declined. Now, stagnation at a few dozen billions in revenue is still good. But very much legacy company stuff.

Microsoft built a whole another company called Azure. Smartly acquired 2 other companies called LinkedIn and Github. Then invested early in the biggest phenomenon of the post covid world - Openai.

Google ended the 2000s with Ads, Search, Youtube and Android. It's 2023 and not much has changed. Facebook sustains it's growth entirely through multi-billion$ acquisitions.

In all cases, the original middle management did very little to help.

Azure is the only exception.

GCP has had growth, like Azure

Office has stagnated? It's the first thing orgs require third-party apps to integrate SSO for.

Office 365 + Sharepoint is a major, major business.

There is no other earth to sell copies of Office to. Very hard to have growth there.

By that metric, Slack, Jira etc are finished because they don't sell to alien civilizations.

The number of employees that need Office 365 accounts is always going to be more than the number that need a Figma, Salesforce or chatGPT account.

And?

All you've pointed out is Wall Street's demand for eternal growth is untenable, as if we didn't already know that.

There's lots of things Microsoft can do to make Windows more valuable and thus charge more for it, and additional services they can sell. They didn't just sell Windows but also a ton of software on top (Encarta, Flight Simulator), added game consoles, made the OS more stable etc. But that doesn't mean a single product line will continue to grow vs. stagnate. You only get to invent the word processor once.

From a stock perspective, yes.

Microsoft has access to ALL corporate data of ALL companies (sharepoint, teams, outlook, office365). Remaining step is to link chatgpt to it and train automated agents.

Not all corporates use Microsoft

That's true. Only 95% of enterprise companies use Azure [0] and only 83% of Fortune 500 use Office 365.

0: https://www.extremetech.com/deals/307468-microsoft-azure-is-...

1: https://zipdo.co/statistics/microsoft-office/

The 17% who don’t use outlook email all their data to the 83% who do use outlook on a daily basis. MSFT has it all.

This is one of the reasons I mostly gave up on protonmail. Sure all my email is encrypted on proton's servers, but everyone else on any given email chain is using gmail, so what's the point?

They can't legally do that though for a vast swath of those companies due to various data-protection regs.

They do already have several "train your own model"-style ChatGPT products available though.

I mean, there’s a dozen lawsuits against OpenAI just for training on published books. If you’re going to get sued anyway, why not train on private data?

Microsoft is too big to fail the perfect place for a shit ceo like Satya to just hold the finger in the wind and go with the flow.

What? Hasn’t Nadella been, like, a complete turnaround from the Ballmer years? Did you think Ballmer was onto something with Windows Mobile and not releasing Office apps for the web/iOS/android?

And you believe these were hard decisions? That's exactly the point everyone besides the stubborn ceo before would have made them.

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