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Microsoft’s Q4 earnings and 2020 expectations
- valleyjo 7y agoIt doesn’t make sense to me that Satya Nadella makes 10x less than Sundar Pichai. Last I saw Satya made about 20M and Sundar was making 200M. Given Microsoft performance vs google I don’t get it.
- gigatexal 7y agoAt some point enough money is enough. "Mo' money, mo' problems" said Biggie. And salary isn't the whole point, perhaps he has some really, really nice golden parachute or is hoarding options, I dunno.
- phkahler 7y agoWhy does anyone make 200M at a publicly owned company?
- valleyjo 7y agoDon’t know. Seems absurd to me. There’s no way Sundar contributes 10x more value. Or anything even close to 200M IMO
- justaguyhere 7y agoMaybe Sundar is better at negotiating his salary than Satya? Can't think of any other logical reason
- bthrn 7y ago"It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along." -Satya Nadella
- zaroth 7y agoHe was rightly skewered for that comment. Biggest load of pure bull I’ve heard in a while. You don’t get what you deserve. Often you don’t get what you ask for. You get only what you demand through persistent and effective negotiation. This is true for a lot of things in life, but it is particularly true for engineering salary. If your point was, perhaps his salary is so “low” because he actually believes what he said then you may be on to something.
- reallydontask 7y agoI think it's fair to say that compensation is unlikely to be correlated with the actual value brought to the business. At best, correlated with perceived value by whoever sets the salary, in this case the board?
- noahl 7y agoAre you suggesting that Google try to poach Satya Nadella? :) I would give a lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
- fhbdukfrh 7y agoNot saying it could never happen, but in addition to being the architect of a renaissance at one of the biggest, must well-known companies in the world, Satya is also a mcrosoftie from pretty much birth. I think it would take a lot more than gobs of money to make him jump.
- peaktechisnow 7y agonot apples to apples. 200M is likely the value of an options grant to be earned over multiple years. $20M for satya is likely an annual comp figure.
- nicoburns 7y agoWhy does anyone make 200M? IMO literally nobody contributes enough value to society to outweigh the negative externalities of one person controlling so much wealth.
- ps101 7y agoIncome isn't tied to contribution to society though. And that's okay.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- IggleSniggle 7y agoIt’s true and probably unavoidable, but that doesn’t make it “okay”
- eclipxe 7y agoIt's okay to me.
- anm89 7y agoI'll second this. The idea of having some government comittee or mob deciding my value to society and then taking what they feel is undeserved is infinitely scarier than some people doing disproportionately well. And let's be clear, there is no other way to implement a policy like this because the criteria is totally subjective.
- nicoburns 7y ago> And let's be clear, there is no other way to implement a policy like this because the criteria is totally subjective. There is a way to implement this in an objective way. Simply heavily tax everybody who earns over a threshold amount. No judgement about what it is that they are doing. It doesn't matter.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 7y agoYou make $200M when without you the company would be significantly more than $200M less profitable. Here we have someone of tomorrow they went to the Board and said, “I’m going to need $200M a year in comp to stay on” they would be insane to turn him down. If you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under Nadella’s leadership, the level of operating profit and growth, he should absolutely be worth $200M to Microsoft and shareholders of Microsoft. It’s not about the number of hours you work. There is a non-linearity when someone can look at a situation and see a solution, or devise a plan, or organize a strategy, or forge a partnership, or foresee an acquisition, that without that person in that position, the company would miss out on potentially $Billions of opportunity. You pay a lot of money if you can get the right person in the room to make those company-crucial decisions correctly.
- libria 7y agoTo his credit, Pichai rejected significant stock awards [1]. Seems genuine to me, though I wonder what Mrs. Pichai's face looked like when he floated it heh. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/05/30/sundar-pichai-google-stock-awards-goog.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/05/30/sundar-p...
- gridlockd 7y ago> Given Microsoft performance vs google I don’t get it. Doesn't it make total sense? Microsoft didn't get to the top by spending money foolishly.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI wouldn’t worry too much about Nadella. He is probably doing very well financially.
- fortran77 7y agoThere's an odd bubble on HN where people are so deep into their Linux or Mac universes that they think Microsoft has faded into obscurity, when in fact they're the strongest tech company around.
- nkozyra 7y agoI don't think this perception is true anymore - people here are generally pretty aware of MS's overall rise in the cloud space.
- ps101 7y agoMicrosoft is also getting some love because they've been doing right by the open source community and haven't ruined Github yet, nor does it look like they're going to.
- nolok 7y agoAlso it's kind of hard to not like VS Code, even on linux.
- loudmax 7y ago> they've been doing right by the open source community MS's newer efforts like VS Code are certainly encouraging. This doesn't change the fundamental issue that much of the world relies on desktop software that only runs on Windows and an office suite that's only compatible with MS Office. These may not seem like much to the HN crowd, but we aren't representative of the economy at large.
- jrs235 7y agoYeah, I am more aware about Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor from the HN crowd that is doing mostly react, vue, node, etc. development (not C#).
- bluedino 7y agoMcDonald's and Walmart might be the strongest restaurants/stores, but that doesn't mean I want to shop there.
- SECProto 7y agoSo does Q4 for Microsoft refer to April-June? And does 2020 refer to calendar year 2020 or business year? I find that somewhat confusing, and the article doesn't expand on it at all.
- mikestew 7y agoI can’t imagine fiscal year starting July 1 has changed since I worked there and paid attention to such things. Can’t help on whether TFA refers to fiscal or calendar 2020.
- bonniemuffin 7y agoYes, the Microsoft fiscal year starts on July 1, so Q4 2019 was April-June, and fiscal year 2020 (for which they're discussing expectations) just started.
- tallanvor 7y agoMicrosoft's fiscal year runes from July 1 through June 30. When they refer to 2020, they're referring to July 1, 2019 through June 30, 2020.
- antome 7y agoOne thing Microsoft has really nailed, is the location diversity of Azure datacenters. They have multiple locations in South Africa and UAE, while also having regions in multiple cities across Australia, Japan and India. If I wanted to launch a worldwide product, why would I want to go with AWS, Google or IBM?
- arethuza 7y agoTwo in the UK as well (UK South and UK West) which is a serious consideration for a lot of organisations.
- ps101 7y agoGenuinely asking as I don't work in that space - what's the advantage of this location diversity?
- slouch 7y agoServices respond more quickly when the datacenter is closer to the user
- me_again 7y agoMany cloud customers have regulatory or business requirements that their data be held within particular regions or national boundaries. It should also help somewhat with latency, though in most cases CDN points of presence will be more critical.
- october_sky 7y agoExcept, those regulatory or business requirements also have business continuity and disaster recovery requirements from those same regulators, and Azure's region design is far inferior than alternatives.
- pdelgallego 7y agoAzure regions/AZs are not equal to AWS regions/AZs thats why a single lightning strike can take down a whole region. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-proves-hard-way-availability-zones-are-good-idea https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-p...
- tootie 7y agoMS has a really appealing mix of business and IT pro products and they've been very clever in how they tie O365, Azure and VSTS together from a marketing perspective. That being said, while all their products are "fine" I don't really love any of them and a few downright suck. O365 was miserable failure at my last shop. It's so bloated with features, that it becomes slow and unusable. They have nothing that Google or Amazon don't do better. I'd also say that between the three of them, I haven't seen a single decent professional services rep.
- reallydontask 7y agoO365 is an interesting one. We were using G-Suite at my previous place, which was on a hiring spree of sales and marketing guys/gals, and pretty much everybody that came in said they'd rather have MS products. Are they better? Maybe, Maybe not. I can almost guarantee that G-suite covered most of their needs but they were just used to MS products and it was easier to bite the bullet and use MS that hear them gripe continuously. Lost productivity has a cost too FWIW, I think G-Suite is probably good enough for 80-90% of users.
- qaq 7y agoprob outlook is hard to replace with gmail for their workflows
- sushisource 7y agoI'd guess that. Gmail has maybe 10% of the features Outlook does. I really dislike it as an email service, especially since they've killed Inbox which at least made it a bit more tolerable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- e40 7y agoG suite can edit native office docs now, so that might ease people into it.
- Pandabob 7y agoI'd be interested in hearing HN's experiences about Azure and how it stacks up against AWS and GCP. What I've been seeing in enterprise settings is that companies that are already using Windows Virtual Desktops feel more comfortable using Azure vs the competition.
- ianai 7y agoMany places are just Microsoft shops with very few (meaning 1) or no other sorts of systems. They’re not shopping around for options outside Ms.
- Miraste 7y agoAzure has solid integration with most Microsoft products. The more of a Microsoft tech stack a company already has, the easier a sell it is. If you're using .NET, Azure is easier to set up and easier to maintain. If you're not already on the Microsoft side of the fence, I'm not sure how they compare, but I suspect AWS is better--although we did have that story a while back about how Azure runs more Linux than Windows Server.
- michannne 7y agoFrom using both, my recommendation is AWS for anything Node-based, Azure for anything else. GCP is severely lacking to both and has never struck me as a serious contender, but maybe there are industries that benefit from the simplicity. I like the control AWS gives you, but it is overwhelming at times. On Azure, everything feels easier to find, and there is not such a steep learning curve. I can set up a site, a repo, my CI/CD pipeline, and a DB within minutes, complete with qa, staging and production deployment cycles, telemetry, and alerts. The reason I wouldn't recommend Node-based deployments with this flow is because Visual Studio and VSTS does not play well with node, feels like it is constantly fighting you to use anything but Node, but for a project in React and an ASP Net Core server, it's incredibly seamless. Meanwhile on AWS, I feel like the control of VMs is a lot better to control. It is more intuitive to set up load balancing schemes on AWS, and the CDN makes just enough more sense than Azure CDN to make me prefer it, but it can't beat the productivity gains I have in Azure, though I feel I just don't have the right use cases to benefit from whatever imrpovements AWS offers. All in all, at this point, you don't lose by choosing either AWS or Azure, other than spending time to learn how AWS services are integrates and what parts of the ecosystem is relevant, so I am not surprised MS is benefiting greatly from Azure.
- pastor_elm 7y ago>In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software) What's so profitable about these areas? I see them as a potential black hole.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago> Microsoft spent $16.87 billion on research and development in 2019 Perhaps it's not even a consideration to them if it's feasible; they're in it to have a leg up in the case that it does pay off massively.
- microtherion 7y ago> we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML And this would be "differentiation" because MS is so well known for their AI/ML, or because none of the other tech giants are active in this space?
- asdfman123 7y agoI'm a .NET developer and I'm very pleased with the direction the tech stack is heading, but man. Microsoft Teams is so much worse than Slack. The UI is so much less intuitive, but worse, they haven't figured out scrolling. I can't scroll quickly through chat history -- it's always loading -- meaning it's much harder to get the information I want. On the other hand, maybe Slack takes up so much memory because it pre-loads everything. But even more damningly, there are fewer emojis. Sometimes there is no emoji for what I am feeling.
- blackoil 7y agoMan!! biggest problem of 2019 developer in communication :emoji:. Try using gifs, there always seems exact one for the mood, or maybe words.
- asdfman123 7y agoAt my last workplace it was fun choosing oddly specific reaction emojis for comments. Like I loaded a gif of a dumpster fire and used it as emoji. I uploaded a picture of my face to use as an emoji. I uploaded the "It's free real estate!" guy. Yes, I'm 33, my coworkers were younger but I have the meme knowledge of someone 2/3rds my age due to endless reddit scrolling, thank you. I can keep up with the kids.
- drankula3 7y agoThat's great, that's fun. What's the business value of using gifs in business discussion though? I thought they were almost exclusively used for emotional expression only.
- nolok 7y agoThese numbers are great, with one caveat: the Teams thing. Several place I work or consult for use Office 365, not for its web app but for its desktop app (pay a fixed sum per month per user, and get access to the latest version word/excel, which is great). As any user of this product can attest, for a couple of months now, Teams has been pushed through the Office 365 updater, causing it to 1. install by itself (even though I consider it a separate product, but hey it's not strictly evil just yet, at least I can understand that it get installed, just like say Publisher even though the user may not use it it's part of the suite's single installer) 2. Open a nag screen after boot that mixes up Teams and your Office 365 account and keep doing it until the users make a Teams account, usually linked to his Office 365 account. Ignoring and closing it is not enough, as it will nag you after every reboot until you pleases it with an offrand of registration. That one is pure freaking evil because either I get called to deal with it (which is a total waste of my time and my customer's money), or people deal with it on their own and end up with each their own account for which they won't remember the password and will forever claim that "no I didn't create it I've never seen that before". 3. If you uninstall Teams, there is a separate tool that gets installed behind your back, called "Teams Machine Wide installer", that will reinstall it without asking and you will be nagged after reboot again. As you can guess from the name, it's not normal Office 365 behavior, it's specific for Teams, and it's separate from the Teams install itself. To the product manager that let this thing happen: seriously, screw you. O365 installer used to be super clear and trustworthy, and now you've ruined it. Don't push auto-reinstall behind the admin's back. So yeah, when it says > It also has had a great year with Teams and has shown real momentum. Teams now claims 13 million users, 30% more than Slack I think those numbers are complete bullshit, and if anything they're disapointing. Teams may or may not be a great tool, but the way Office users are being turned into Teams users without them really asking for it only to then claim a high number of users doesn't inspire any confidence to me. Beside that, I'm a massive user of Microsoft's products, have been for a long time, and the great results are deserved on all front (as long as you give Windows 10 a pass of "O&O ShutUp 10" to remove the layer of crapware)
- ianai 7y agoMicrosoft has really made some dark technological implementations in recent years. Sadly, it’d probably take another decade of this stuff before they faced any real pushback.
- d--b 7y agoIsn't Q4 in the future? Have I missed 6 months?
- alexashka 7y agoThe last line in the article I found intriguing: 16 billion spent on R&D? That's a lot... What are they so actively researching?
- jongalloway2 7y agoThere's a pretty good overview of the research areas here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ There's also a Microsoft Research podcast with interviews here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/category/podcast/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/category/podca... A lot of stuff you'd expect like AI, ML, HCI, cloud computing, security, but also stuff like acoustics, social media impacts of computing, biology and medicine, etc.
- shmed 7y agoR&D is not just "research", it's also "development". All money spent on engineering work count toward that 16 billion.
- sidcool 7y agoMicrosoft's R&D spending is staggeringly high!
- codesforhugs 7y agoThey do a serious amount of pure research. If you haven't before, it's interesting to browse https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research and see just how broad it is.
- raylangivens 7y agoMSFT employee here, Teams sucks balls. I have only barely used Slack but when I joined the company everyone was using SfB which blew dead goats. Teams is much better than that. But the search is bad, I agree on scrolling, its atrocious. But man, I have a big gripe with search. Never do I get the results I want. People search is even worse. Adding a new person to chat with somehow takes more clicks than necessary. It will only show a limited number of people whom you conversed with when you scrolled down. The higher MAU numbers are just because it comes pre-packaged with O365 subscription. Difficult to discern how much traction it would get if it stood on its own. My 2 cents.