5 ms·
As someone that is very naive when it comes to earnings reports, do you mind explaining why this is interesting?
by pscsbs 10y ago
As someone that is very naive when it comes to earnings reports, do you mind explaining why this is interesting?
- Mikeb85 10y agoBecause Microsoft is a more traditional software company, selling software licenses, plus their once dominant market share.
- CydeWeys 10y agoMicrosoft used to be the 800 pound gorilla in the tech space. No one even came close to it in size. Now Alphabet (and presumably Apple, though verify the numbers) are bigger than it by every conceivable relevant metric.
- ariwilson 10y agoGrowing up (1996-2006), I remember every software industry article was either excited about what Microsoft would do next in some space or terrified that Microsoft would step in and destroy some business. Due to this, there are now a generation of people with an atavistic fear of Microsoft. See also embrace, extend and extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
- hga 10y agoAnd our original host noted the sea change when Microsoft stopped being that 800 pound gorilla: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
- acchow 10y agoApple has more revenue and net income(latest quarter @ $46.9bn and $9bn) than Google and Microsoft combined.
- lambdasquirrel 10y agoAdding to what others said, slashdot.org was the water-cooler news site back then and the icon for Microsoft was a borgified Bill Gates. Microsoft did everything it could to destroy openness in the software world. They wrote that the GPL was a virus, hired prominent heads of open source projects like Miguel de Icaza and the name of the Gentoo guy who I forget, and nothing really became of those projects afterwards. And of course there was Netscape and IE up through IE8, IE6 being the most infamous. Yeah... Microsoft was the bad guy on the block. (edit: misspelled Gentoo)
- flukus 10y agoIt was depressing seeing how MS treated OSS on their own ecosystem (.net). For every good project MS would release there own inferior clone and the whole ecosystem was left worse off.
- lambdasquirrel 10y agoMicrosoft ate their own platform is what it was and then people stopped developing for them. That was one really big reason why the web became a thing. Everything used to run on the desktop. Microsoft quashed that, and then Google came along, made search, maps and mail work. Firefox and Opera (and yes, Safari) circumvented IE; Google pretty much funded Mozilla for Firefox until it came out with Chrome, basing off of Apple's webkit. It's remarkable that those of us in the Linux world spent so much time trying to unseat Microsoft from the desktop, and what did it in the end was Google and Apple simply working around the Microsoft/Intel (i.e. "Wintel") monopoly.
- hga 10y agoBut the way they quashed it is instructive: every few years they'd come up with some New, Improved way of doing it, and depreciating the old. People got sick and tired of learning the latest arcane, hard to program, generally with some degree of buggyness, poorly documented approach, only to have that become obsolete, and put what they'd created in jeopardy.
- 10y ago
- yuhong 10y agoMy favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, of course.