4 ms·

Microsoft is a $2T company, I feel like they could afford to do it right.

hughrr 5y ago
Apparently they favour fucking it up several times.
onion2k 5y ago
The market cap doesn't tell you anything about the available resources a company has. For example... Gamestop's market cap did this recently - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/marke... - the company doesn't suddenly have more money to spend on projects.
- eloff 5y ago
  Not a great example since they sold over a billion worth of stock. They do actually have more money now. Microsoft generates more money than they know what to do with so they return large amounts in dividends and probably stock buybacks (I haven't checked for MSFT specifically, but it's all the rage these days.) That's essentially the opposite of what GME did.
  - robjan 5y ago
    MSFT dividend yield is nothing to write home about. Less than 1% per year at the moment.
    - eloff 5y ago
      That's mostly because of the stock run-up, I recall it was around 3% late last year.
eloff 5y ago
Regardless of what the financial markets value them at, their resources are proportional to profits, not market cap. That aside, they also have lots of products and teams and some have more budget and resources than others. Saving some memory usage in teams for more than double the development costs, is probably an unattractive position for that team. It also makes it hard to keep features consistent across platforms (as it is, teams struggles with that!)
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Balance-sheet aggregation != perfect execution consistency. - DOS 4.0 - Microsoft Bob - Windows ME - Windows Vista - JScript - MSJVM - Zune - Eliminating all/most easter eggs https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-worst-missteps-of-all-time.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-wor... You can make many, many mistakes as a giant company, so long as they're not fatal. ;-)
- prepend 5y ago
  Zune was good.
  - ehvatum 5y ago
    “Plays for sure” Oops, doesn’t play at all.
ikerdanzel 5y ago
Share market can double overnight while hiring process will take months. Plus, market valuation increase purely due to the last shares traded between owners of the MSFT shares unless MS themselves participate to raise capital by issuing more shares. Borrowing now is way cheaper as 2T means they cashflow in coming months need to reflect that.

Apparently they favour fucking it up several times.

The market cap doesn't tell you anything about the available resources a company has. For example... Gamestop's market cap did this recently - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/marke... - the company doesn't suddenly have more money to spend on projects.

eloff 5y ago
Not a great example since they sold over a billion worth of stock. They do actually have more money now. Microsoft generates more money than they know what to do with so they return large amounts in dividends and probably stock buybacks (I haven't checked for MSFT specifically, but it's all the rage these days.) That's essentially the opposite of what GME did.
- robjan 5y ago
  MSFT dividend yield is nothing to write home about. Less than 1% per year at the moment.
  - eloff 5y ago
    That's mostly because of the stock run-up, I recall it was around 3% late last year.

eloff 5y ago

Regardless of what the financial markets value them at, their resources are proportional to profits, not market cap. That aside, they also have lots of products and teams and some have more budget and resources than others. Saving some memory usage in teams for more than double the development costs, is probably an unattractive position for that team. It also makes it hard to keep features consistent across platforms (as it is, teams struggles with that!)

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Balance-sheet aggregation != perfect execution consistency. - DOS 4.0 - Microsoft Bob - Windows ME - Windows Vista - JScript - MSJVM - Zune - Eliminating all/most easter eggs https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-worst-missteps-of-all-time.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-wor... You can make many, many mistakes as a giant company, so long as they're not fatal. ;-)

prepend 5y ago
Zune was good.
- ehvatum 5y ago
  “Plays for sure” Oops, doesn’t play at all.

ikerdanzel 5y ago

Share market can double overnight while hiring process will take months. Plus, market valuation increase purely due to the last shares traded between owners of the MSFT shares unless MS themselves participate to raise capital by issuing more shares. Borrowing now is way cheaper as 2T means they cashflow in coming months need to reflect that.