Microsoft crosses $3T in market cap | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft crosses $3T in market cap

cnbc.com

49 pointsgeox34 comments

We're in a strange situation.

Microsoft is "back" and "doing better" -- everyone agrees. There is some basis for this perception. From a developer's or enthusiast's perspective, it has done some things to build goodwill, like developing VSCode and WSL. From an investor's perspective it has made some good acquisitions, like those of GitHub and OpenAI.

But from a customer's perspective, its software is the worst it's ever been. Windows is full of ads. Office is bloated. Everybody says Teams is especially bad.

So when people "root" for a company, and say it's "doing well", like a sports team, what do they mean? Are they talking from the perspective of an investor? Of an employee? Of a customer?

I worry sometimes that we put on our investor hats and cheer on companies for increasing their stock prices, when it's at the expense of customers, and we are ourselves those customers.

Last week I bought Copilot Pro ($30/month) with a Business Premium License ($27/month), and I'm not seeing the value / justification for Microsoft's AI Hype that has rolled into their stock price.

Most of Copilot Pro is a Chat GPT drop in (Word), which is unremarkable. Yes, you can prompt it to generate context specific responses via referencing a separate Word document that you've saved on your OneDrive, but that's no different than a Chat GPT plugin. In the end, it's just generative text. I haven't seen anything of substance yet for Excel.

PowerPoint's ability to take a Word document and make a presentation out of it (I absolutely hate making Powerpoints so this was why I frankly bought a license) _and_ use my company's Powerpoint brand template is pretty bad (in terms of generative / creative ability of designing the slides and content layout) and nonexistent (can't use my company branding).

The one redeeming aspect of Copilot Pro is Microsoft Teams meeting summaries, but I can't use it because I'm using a Business Premium license on my personal laptop and I can't use the Copilot Pro because my company credentials are with an O365 E3 license / my company will never buy Copilot Pro.

I bought it for myself to automate the tasks I do everyday (very basic Excel stuff) / assist in the more difficult aspects (create PowerPoint decks) and Copilot Pro isn't capable of substantively assisting me in these areas...yet. We will see if this changes.

There's a guy on YouTube that has been doing a great job detailing the differences between Copilot Pro consumer ($20/month) and Copilot Pro Premium ($30 month for 12 months, mandatory $360/year for Business Premium / I think the same single license flexibility is available for E3/E5) - https://youtu.be/UQlwywZ41t8?si=dWGwFsQvDdoqxxIc

> I'm not seeing the value / justification for Microsoft's AI Hype that has rolled into their stock price.

Remember when an iced tea company saw their stock value skyrocket because they added “blockchain” to their name?

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...

You don’t need the value to be there, just the hype.

Your experience essentially mirrors the state of the product category.

Incapable of serving as a general purpose tool, outside of specialized use cases (NLP + action, summarization).

There are more generalized things in the works that would improve that (from Microsoft and others), but afaik nothing has been released to consumers.

The issue with Microsoft's Power nee Copilot strategy has always been unification -- it may share one branding, but you're really talking about different teams, writing different integrations, with different amounts of functionality.

It's hard to meet customer expectations when "magic thing that works with PowerPoint Copilot doesn't exist in Excel Copilot."

And right now, GenAI is dependent on access to integration scaffolding with the specific service+activity -- ergo, much more IFTTT and less general purpose magic box.

Correct.

People say they want an AI but really they want something to automate and complete their daily workflow/tasks.

How that is accomplished is through the integrations, as you've described. But I am at a loss as to how these integrations have anything to do with NLP.

What most (non-developer) users want is an ability to describe what they do (in non-code, natural language terms) and have a moderately intelligent system iteratively build/modify a solution for them.

From that perspective, the product is essentially constructing a mapping between NLP and available pre-built code integration points.

So in some ways it tries to shoehorn what's available via APIs and attempts to shoehorn it based on the NLP parsed prompt...I guess?

Except good luck using ChatGPT for corporate environments like banking, healthcare, cars. The core strength of Microsoft is B2B and their ability to support it.

According to Google Finance, their p/e is almost 40.

Not sure they have enough growth in them to justify that valuation. Apple is 32 and Google is below 30.

Overall, I think the whole market is frothy. But MSFT seems even more unjustifiable than the rest (other than Nvidia and Tesla :)

I'll bet the higher valuation is because of their investment in OpenAI

People are trying to buy exposure to OpenAI models running on Azure cloud.. I think that they are betting we are at an inflection point and not thinking about the fundamentals of Microsoft's existing businesses at all.

If you assume that a tool like ChatGPT can add 30 minutes per day in office worker productivity and then estimate how many office workers there are worldwide and how much they get paid on average and assume Microsoft can maybe capture 10% of that value, then the market cap is not that crazy.

Check AMD's PE and then revisit MSFT.

So they would have to double their earnings to be an investment that pays itself back in 20 years. Not an easy task for a company of that size, and even then not a very lucrative investment..

Makes sense. MSFT has potential for growth, Google is basically lives and die by their ad revenue coming from Search monopoly and Apple lives and dies by iPhone sales.

Ahead of France and behind UK's GDP: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

What does it mean when companies are this big?

You should compare gdp to revenue, not market cap

It means some countries have screwed up their economies.

But, yeah, apples and oranges here.

You are comparing net worth vs income.

It means that mass, plausibly coordinated (again) downward pressure on employee compensation via a staggered sequence of staccato layoff rounds that no RIFer would sign off on under any normal conditions should have the Justice Department involved (again, again).

Is there a RIF.ai model yet? That alone would be worth a few hundred Billion.

It means that France and the UK have so thoroughly buried themselves in regulations that they've failed to innovate in any meaningful way.

It doesn't means anything, for example there is even a company in France that has more revenue than MS. ( Total S.A ).

It means we as a society value the wrong things. The planet is simultaneously on fire and underwater and we’re wasting literal and figurative energy on useless cryptographic puzzles and misleading auto-corrects, all in the name of getting rich fast(er). Hey, as long as the line goes up, right?

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Global economy is like 90T. If Microsoft disappeared tomorrow there would probably be trillions in economic damage, but it's still hard to rationalize market cap worth 3% or global gdp. Software equivalent of credit card transaction fee but for basic productivity.

I believe your number for the global economy is GDP, which is more analogous to revenue than to market cap. Microsoft's revenue was $211 billion or 0.2% of global GDP.

Yeah, revenue is more analogous, but the idea market cap of single companies can exceed single digit percent of global GDP is pretty wild to me.

If you have code on GitHub or contribute to projects hosted on GitHub then part of that value belongs to you. Good luck retrieving it though.

git clone worked last time I tried

The value, not the code.

There is always Codeberg or Gitlab.

I picked the latter and hope that it doesn't eventually end up with Microsoft too.

Satya did turn the company around, didn't he? It seems a reliable way to create wealth without too much trouble is to start a company and then find someone capable to run it.

Im on the hill that Ballmer turned the company around as he walked out the door, and Satya gets all the credit.

The Microsoft One was possibly the biggest reorganization the company ever saw. Ballmer pulled the trigger, was the fall guy for the past problems, and once he fixed it, it was also important to tell a new mythology which required a new titan. https://news.microsoft.com/2013/07/11/one-microsoft-company-...

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