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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Microsoft has a $2.77 trillion market cap despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do proves large swaths of the economy are fake.

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> despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do

Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players. Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)

> terrible at virtually everything it tries

Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind using:

Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)

Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and sometimes kind of useful:

Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and PowerPoint

I really don't like Microsoft products (notable exceptions include: F# and Age of Empires). But they are really good at getting companies to spend large amounts of money on their products. Slack is strictly better than Teams, however a company that already has Windows, Outlook, and Office really needs a good reason to spend $20/user (or whatever it is) for Slack over Teams. Azure I don't think is as good as AWS or GCP, however for a lot of business its we are already on Azure with Office 365 so why not?

> F# and Age of Empires

;-) I have never disliked MS games, or Xbox, or Game Pass.

I also dislike Teams, but Microsoft has integration, which means that it works with Outlook's calendar, with Office documents, etc. It's mediocre but full-featured.

I wonder what would have happened if Google Docs had evolved into a credible MS Office competitor? It's also amazing that Skype (and Hangouts/Meet for that matter) had such a head start over Zoom.

Google Docs is a competitor, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can take significant market share from Microsoft, especially among customers deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem.

The reverse is also true: companies that are heavily invested in Google Workspace, GCP, and related tools are unlikely to switch to Office 365.

That said, there are exceptions. Legal professionals, for instance, often require the standard: Microsoft Word. And for advanced tasks, Google Sheets falls short of what Excel can do.

Docs had a big head start over Office 365, but Microsoft kept working toward the goal of desktop Office feature parity and document compatibility, which they basically ultimately delivered.

Imho it just speaks to importance of first mover advantage, land grab, and most importantly distribution distribution distribution.

It's not fake, it's reality. And things have always has been this way.

I recently left a company that was spending $10million on SalesForce licenses that no one was apparently using. When the re-org happened, heads were rolled.

How common do you think that story is? Over paying for software that doesn't actually make users more productive?

They are pretty good at making money at the end of the day, with ~100 billion/yr profits. Their P/E is only 30, which isn't outrageously overpriced.

What strikes you as fake?

I don't think so, products are not the 100% of a business.

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