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It's interesting that last summer Elon said he had "a really bad feeling" and now Satya is making economic predictions. How much information to these tech compa

It's interesting that last summer Elon said he had "a really bad feeling" and now Satya is making economic predictions. How much information to these tech companies really have were they can extract/forecast economic trends?

moneywoes 4y ago
Or maybe they influence these negative downturns to implement cost cutting
spankalee 4y ago
I think the cloud, ads, search, and very large ecommerce companies have a lot of economic data and a lot more realtime than most other organizations. Imagine the picture you can put together if you see trends in cloud usage and orders, ad buys, search trends for shopping and other econ indicators (layoffs, unemployment, job hunting, COBRA), and actual shopping transaction volume. Many of these you can see change by the minute.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Microsoft probably have also pretty good idea just how many computers running their operating system is being sold or licensed. What are the licensing numbers for Office suite and 365. Outlook and AD seats, Teams. They should actually have pretty unique view to just about how most companies on the planet or in at the least in the West are doing or looking to do from employee numbers.
smalley 4y ago
I would imagine most of the very large companies have a treasury group that's managing their excess cash etc and that those people are probably offering lots of opinions on general economic direction. Couple that with contact with lots of their peer group doing the same, the economic consulting groups they're all hiring and contact with a bunch of bankers and I'd assume they'd start feeling they have an opinion. Add to that what they see in their own business when they're broad enough and I'd see why they'd start expounding on the topic
sottol 4y ago
These companies have large amounts of cash and cash-flow/revenue that need to be managed, so they have at least a few people working on thus full-time (or whole teams, e.g. Google). I wouldn't be surprised if these world's largest companies have about as much info in aggregate as many large hedge funds (in some ways less, more in others).

moneywoes 4y ago

Or maybe they influence these negative downturns to implement cost cutting

spankalee 4y ago

I think the cloud, ads, search, and very large ecommerce companies have a lot of economic data and a lot more realtime than most other organizations. Imagine the picture you can put together if you see trends in cloud usage and orders, ad buys, search trends for shopping and other econ indicators (layoffs, unemployment, job hunting, COBRA), and actual shopping transaction volume. Many of these you can see change by the minute.

Ekaros 4y ago
Microsoft probably have also pretty good idea just how many computers running their operating system is being sold or licensed. What are the licensing numbers for Office suite and 365. Outlook and AD seats, Teams. They should actually have pretty unique view to just about how most companies on the planet or in at the least in the West are doing or looking to do from employee numbers.

smalley 4y ago

I would imagine most of the very large companies have a treasury group that's managing their excess cash etc and that those people are probably offering lots of opinions on general economic direction. Couple that with contact with lots of their peer group doing the same, the economic consulting groups they're all hiring and contact with a bunch of bankers and I'd assume they'd start feeling they have an opinion. Add to that what they see in their own business when they're broad enough and I'd see why they'd start expounding on the topic

sottol 4y ago

These companies have large amounts of cash and cash-flow/revenue that need to be managed, so they have at least a few people working on thus full-time (or whole teams, e.g. Google). I wouldn't be surprised if these world's largest companies have about as much info in aggregate as many large hedge funds (in some ways less, more in others).