Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
reuters.com
reuters.com
Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.
The other one aims to strap screens to other people's faces to keep them even longer in a perpetually-online computer bubble of their own choosing, because that's been going great for society so far.
Apple is also invested in AI, they just refuse to use the AI buzzword, and use ML instead, which is probably the more accurate term.
Did you forget allowing the sum total of human knowledge to be swamped by dogshit, because it allows for the creation of dogshit at scale more cheaply than ever before?
What does that even mean? When has human knowledge ever gotten "swamped" by the capability of creating newer content?
And potentially kills people's jobs, potentially helps spammers and phisher to start larger and better campaigns, potentially increases the amount of fake news, disinformation or just bullshit.
Honest question: does Wall Street care? In my experience, this is the kind of thing that’s (rightly or wrongly) considered a “cost center”, not a “profit center”.
In some sense, that is the right move. For example, Intel was a market leader for decades while their research arm was very stagnant for many years too. Other times, it is short sighted not to price in what might be to come because you miss buying shares on the cheap before a huge technology/product leap.
Some people on wallstreet do. In Mckinsey's book Valuation, they make it pretty clear to the reader that companies who spend a lot on r&d tend to have outsized returns compared to their counterparts, who don't spend that much.
I didn't want to say this without doing a little bit of homework so I checked their Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research) which doesn't list any accomplishments, just claims they have a lot of patents, and their main site has a publication index (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/?) but publication is not a good metric for ever seeing use.
Here is a video of it demo'd: https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o
Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but as far as actual research output that has been commercialized, there is not much to show off.
Except a 2.8 trillion dollar valuation at the top of the biggest stock market in the world.
Note that it does research and not R&D. You aren't going to get products from research but rather technology advancements that then get incorporated. That happens a lot, and they obviously publish a lot.
The Haskell 1.0 specification was published before Microsoft Research existed at all.
(I worked briefly on a Haskell compiler in those days.)
Of course investors aren't rewarding them for an upcoming VR headset which is yet to be proven. Why would they?
They are forced to by their hardware business model. Almost every entry point to the Apple ecosystem is through hardware and nobody can meet QC and scale of Chinese factories. Too much of a risk to block China and risk supply chain disruptions.
... then i just got an email receipt from my xbox gold subscription. curses!
What's the story behind your key?
That "single device company" makes just half of its revenue from iPhones. Recurring services revenue accounted for almost 25%.
They can structure their financial reports however they like, but it doesn't change the fact that their entire ecosystem is directly or indirectly tied to that one device.
One way to think about this is that Apple isn't diversified enough. Another way to think about it is that Microsoft's long tail is a mess.
Would they? Microsoft also own other stuff they monetize like GitHub, Linkedin, X-Box, and a shit tonne of gaming IP inclusing Activision Blizzard, plus other things I'm surely forgetting.
Looks pretty diverse to me comapred to a company who's revenue stream is limited by the ammounts of walled garden phones it can sell and who's grasp over its walled garden can be regualted away by the EU waving their wand the same way they lost the Lightnig cable revenue stream.
Can Apple keep up this momentum in the long run and keep growing by getting people to buy more expensive stuff, or will they slowly loose steam and stagnate?
Office and Azure make up half of their revenue, but their other revenue streams are actually different things, like Windows, gaming, LinkedIn, Bing advertising. It's actual diversification.
With the introduction of IE in 1995 and its deep integration into Win95 and ruthless take-no-prisoners assault on Netscape, Microsoft was probably already aware that they were starting to resemble a monopoly, given Apple's poor sales and market share at the time. My personal take is that MS propped up Apple to help appear to have a competitor ahead of the Antitrust action in 2001[2].
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I'm _pretty_ sure Apple could have gotten the money from elsewhere if they really had to. It's history now, so we'll never know for sure, but I'd bet that they could have found other investors if they really had to. People seem to think it's a black and white scenario - money from MS or death! But I don't think it ever was.
They were already on a bit of a shaky nail for a while when they relied only on Office and Windows, but their shift to the cloud (and resultant cuddly Embrace of Linux) has paid off well for them, so overall a smart move on their part.
In ~theory~ such an announcement would be priced into the markets since market capitalization is also dependent on future expected returns.
Maybe investors just don't think everyone will be wearing $3000 digital fisheye goggles in a few years.
https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/apple-wwdc-2023/card/ap...
Also Microsoft is still selling HoloLens but for selected audience.
It seems to be rewarding Apple? They also had a similar market cap two years ago. Microsoft has seen growth in revenue and net income, Apple has not. Going back to pre-covid times the picture is similar: better financial results for Microsoft but still head-to-head with Apple in market cap.
What has Microsoft been innovating recently?
>taking tested and consolidated tech from others and rebranding it as its own.
Didn't Microsoft just recently build out a whole public cloud infrastructure by copying AWS and "rebranding it as its own"?
That's not innovating, that's direct competition, red in tooth and claw - something MS relishes.
He’s offered a short opinion on the behaviours of two companies and made something of an ethical judgement.
Why disparage someone for daring to have an opinion?
If you’re going to excuse this guy making an obnoxious unfounded moral high ground claim, grant me the same courtesy for telling others not to preach about things they don’t know.
If you ever find yourself writing something like “I don’t know much about X.” Then don’t conclude your statement with an assertion about X. Go learn about X or ask questions or shut up. Your opinion contributed negative value when it’s knowingly predicated on incomplete information.
Would you mind sharing what the other comment is missing?
After that, you can start to try and figure how where most of the money comes from. For Apple this is the iPhone hardware sales and the App Store tax. For Microsoft it’s split roughly evenly across cloud, business processes and PCs. Cloud is the biggest.
These are the basic fundamental facts that begin to describe why Microsoft may or may not be valued. I don’t care or have an opinion on it. But I’m irritated by some guy saying he heard four media headlines ergo shame on wall st. for trading based on those four headlines. Like shut the fuck up man. That’s such a stupid claim. And look how many people have been suckered into responding to this garbage.
Love them or hate them, Apple isn’t playing that game (and despite their having hired Giannandrea, who was the reason Google has an AI strategy in the first place).
But I think wall street is ignoring them at the moment.
Thing the markets would care about, thing you are personally bothered by, thing the markets would care about. Got it.
No, the advertising and telemetry in Windows isn't a reason for the markets to value Microsoft highly.
I don't want to use the "bubble" word, but...
Even just building AI into existing products could help justify price increases, offset on the customer side by higher productivity.
In plain English: AI means companies will need fewer knowledge workers per unit revenue and MS will have a strong claim on some of those additional profits if they are supplying the AI (even if they are reselling OpenAI).
This is probably the bingo statement. Everyone has seen the layoff's recently. Markets are expected to take a turn for the worse. In such a situation, a highly diversified company would be perceived as more valuable than a high-end consumer brand.
If he hadn’t sold his stock, he’d be worth ~$1.5 Trillion
To put that into context, he'd be worth 6x Elon Musk (who's the current riches person-in-the-world)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire....
What he does instead is take out loans against his stock.
Bill could have done the same and still fund all his philanthropy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/lawrence-j-e....
It's a big mistake they didn't invest in the space earlier.
To enter the cloud market they are pretty late to the game ...
Nothing epitomizes that more than the reduction of all users to a goddamned "Microsoft account" that nobody wants. You can't use or even install Windows now unless you do so as a "Microsoft account," lest you be hounded day and night to log in, log IN, LOG IN WITH YOUR "MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!!!!"
Office365 is subscription trash with hopelessly inept UI. Windows itself is a depressing shitshow of UI defects and... I was going to say half-baked... but in reality NO ideas.
I was a professional developer on Windows from the days of separate 16- and 32-bit versions of Visual C++, eventually leading what was (according to Microsoft, as far as they knew) the largest Visual C++ project of the early/mid-'90s. You could have called me an evangelist for most of their products. I continued using Visual Studio until the mid-2000s, even while working at Apple.
Today I don't have a single installation of Windows running in my home (which is also my business). I'm a pilot, and I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but not even that is enough to get me to buy an Intel box and tolerate the disgusting abuse that is being a Microsoft Windows user. There's simply no excuse for the execrable state of Windows, Microsoft's other product offerings, and the way they treat users. Fuck Microsoft.
So far their approach has been different, but their last keynote mentioned ML countless times. We can only assume they have more in the pipeline, and it will run locally on-device, which seems preferable to all the data collection being done with most companies working on AI.
blah blah those who don't study history something whatever
I hope Apple does succeed though because I love their hardware and their silicon is great for AI applications.
The biggest question mark, like you mention, is how innovative can Apple be under Tim Cook? Are there systems and people in place to serve as those visionaries when the CEO is an operator at heart? I often wonder how much of what we’ve seen was in the pipeline when Jobs was still around, or is simply taken from what is popular in the moment vs having a vision for the future.
Surely you're not lauding a near-useless gimmick that inexplicably doesn't work on the (defectively) giant trackpads of Apple's own computers... or most of their iPads.
First gen still is no worse than first-gen Magic Mouse, which launched under jobs though. Which is my main point, I don’t think Jobs was solely responsible for apple’s focus on design
> Near-useless gimmick
Man, millions of procreate enthusiasts would beg to disagree
> doesn’t work on the giant trackpads
Does anyone who stops to think about this for more than 2 seconds actually want this? What would you use it for besides digital signatures? Writing-to-text is just barely usable on tablets, I can’t see it being viable when you can’t see what you’re writing.
"Does anyone who stops to think about this for more than 2 seconds actually want this?"
Really? Have you ever heard of Wacom? They built an entire company on people who want this, and it has been in business for decades. And of course you can see what you're writing, right there on the screen! The surface area of current Apple laptop trackpads is 33% larger than that of a Wacom Intuos tablet: https://i.imgur.com/D8pmsTC.jpeg
It has nothing to do with handwriting recognition, either. That's another area where Apple failed spectacularly to make the Pencil useful. All they had to do is add a single-character writing area to the standard keyboard on the iPad, as was nailed in the '90s by Palm. That way, ALL applications would have immediately have gotten handwriting-entry capability. Instead, Apple left it up to every application developer to implement it separately. Baffling.
All of that makes the trackpad a much better option.
The first-gen Magic Mouse used AA batteries and did not have the charging issue of the current Magic Mouse. The second-gen Magic Mouse, with an internal battery and the horribly designed charging port, was released in 2015, 4 years after Jobs died.
Jobs was largely responsible for Apple's obsessive focus on design, even if he didn't design everything himself. He positioned Jony Ive to be #2 at the top of the company, no other company (other than maybe a strict design firm) is going to have a design person be 2nd in command after the CEO. He also famously reviewed each thing that was going out the door and it had to meet his standard of design. This goes far back, here is a story from when they were designing the original Macintosh, they handed the design to Jobs, because he kept rejecting all their designs.
https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
Of course there were misses under Jobs well, no one is perfect. The mouse the shipped with the G3 iMac, while it may have looked good in a press photo, was not great to use. That said, I have a hard time believing Jobs would have let the changing of the first Apple Pencil or the second-gen Magic Mouse out the door. They are so awkward. Even the newest pencil, plugging it in with a cord is weird compared the elegance of the second-gen Pencil.
(Along with just-about-good-enough speech-to-text, if I speak clearly, and checking on the weather outside.)
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But yes, totally agree with your underlying point about the huge opportunity that Apple is leaving on the table with their lackluster approach to Siri.
Apple is also mostly a consumer oriented business. I can’t see them selling AI as a stand alone service.
When you can state something concrete about Apple's products or services that can be improved with so-called "AI," let us know.