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Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
- bmitc 3y agoRe-overtakes. It's happened several times.
- cryptos 3y agoBut that makes it somewhat entertaining :-) Have you ever heard of the German sports club "Bayern Munich" ("FC Bayern")? They've won all national titles since 2013! _That_ is boring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Bayern_Munich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Bayern_Munich
- thriftwy 3y ago[flagged]
- zwieback 3y agoCloud and AI investments are paying off.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoStock price comes from public expectations. This just confirms that the public expects openai to pay off
- bch 3y ago> […]thanks to the early lead the company has taken in generative artificial intelligence through an investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
- kcb 3y agoThey put themselves in the best position to capitalize on AI especially in the enterprise but also by integrating Copilot into Windows. With so many companies already trusting their confidential data to MS, it's easy to justifying using their/OpenAI tech through Azure. CPU architectures are irrelevant to Microsoft at this point.
- partiallypro 3y agoMicrosoft is also starting to develop their own chips and are expanding more into ARM. They can't just "abandon" x86/64 like people think they can, it's not realistic. If they ever do it will be almost 20 years from now unless ARM just gets -that- far ahead that they have no choice.
- KoftaBob 3y agoTheir revenue sources are more diverse than you think. Products that are either directlyfrom their portfolio, or from a company they have a large stake in - Windows - Office 365, which includes Teams, a product that has boomed in usage since 2020 - Xbox + Activision Blizzard - Azure Cloud, the 2nd largest cloud computing platform - Github, by far the largest version control platform for developers - Linkedin, quickly becoming one of the largest platforms for hiring - Bing search + their ad network - OpenAI/ChatGPT - Edge browser - Surface line of laptops and tablets
- nikanj 3y agoBecause they picked a CEO with a background in the very products the company is making. Often companies this size pick a professional bean-counter to man the helm, with predictable results
- ozim 3y agoRelevant for who? Influencers that have to have MacBook because otherwise they cannot show off their “wealth”. MS was doing relevant stuff for corporations like banks, insurance companies, public services. That is where real money is Apple doesn’t have any of it.
- tempaway82751 3y agoMicrosoft is the most diversified of the major players. OS, Office, Enterprise, Cloud, Gaming, Devices, AI
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- otalp 3y agoI would argue Amazon is more diversified but bogged down by a low margin retail business
- orthoxerox 3y agoMicrosoft relies on independent hardware vendors selling Windows PCs, so they can't just go and build their own CPU like Apple can. They partnered with Qualcomm, but Qualcomm underdelivered.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago[flagged]
- amanzi 3y agoWindows only contributes around 12% to Microsoft's revenue.
- seydor 3y agoThis rally doesnt make a lot of sense
- devinprater 3y agoApple just has to make a Siri key on their MacBooks. They'll then be so number one they might go passed 1 into 0, and then -1, ETC. /s
- scottyah 3y agoThe main things I see lately are: Apple is creating VR headsets and new chip technology, Microsoft is buying up AI companies and injecting ads/spyware into their operating systems. Also Microsoft is getting big into cloud. Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.
- sho_hn 3y agoOk, so one of those technologies potentially saves people time and levels the playing field by enabling the use of computers with less special training to achieve equivalent results. The other one aims to strap screens to other people's faces to keep them even longer in a perpetually-online computer bubble of their own choosing, because that's been going great for society so far.
- croes 3y ago>potentially saves people time And potentially kills people's jobs, potentially helps spammers and phisher to start larger and better campaigns, potentially increases the amount of fake news, disinformation or just bullshit.
- al_borland 3y agoThose are some upsides of AI, there are also many potential downsides that could be very harmful to society, more so than some AR goggles. Time will tell how it all plays out. Apple is also invested in AI, they just refuse to use the AI buzzword, and use ML instead, which is probably the more accurate term.
- tivert 3y ago> Ok, so one of those technologies potentially saves people time and levels the playing field by enabling the use of computers with less special training to achieve equivalent results. Did you forget allowing the sum total of human knowledge to be swamped by dogshit, because it allows for the creation of dogshit at scale more cheaply than ever before?
- paradox242 3y ago
- riley333 3y agoApple just needs to do SOMETHING exciting with AI. Vision Pro looks great, but it's only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. I'm not sure if they're just too big to move at the speed they need to move or if it's something more damning about their internal culture but they need to do something in this space faster than I think most people realize.
- iwontberude 3y agoOr maybe they just need to survive long enough to see what is actually valuable in AI and not going to damn their company.
- al_borland 3y agoApple is rarely first to release new tech. They watch and develop quietly in the lab, then release an implementation that everyone else seems to copy. So far their approach has been different, but their last keynote mentioned ML countless times. We can only assume they have more in the pipeline, and it will run locally on-device, which seems preferable to all the data collection being done with most companies working on AI.
- Eric_WVGG 3y agoFunny how we’re at the eve of Vision Pro coming to consumers, twelve years after the Oculus Rift. blah blah those who don't study history something whatever
- riley333 3y agoThat's true, and Apple has the capital to do pretty much whatever they want. I just think as we've seen with Google/Gemini it doesn't seem that easy to beat what OpenAI has going even with a lot of money to throw behind it. And I don't think Tim Cook is that much of a visionary but that's just my personal opinion. I hope Apple does succeed though because I love their hardware and their silicon is great for AI applications.
- al_borland 3y ago
- paxys 3y agoMicrosoft's recent stock gains are obviously due to AI hype and the expected returns from it, but does the company actually have obvious lines of revenue from AI to that degree? Looking at the numbers investors are expecting them to make more from LLMs than they do from products like Windows and Office. I don't want to use the "bubble" word, but...
- Workaccount2 3y agoPeople expect LLM's to be folded into Office, and MS to command a premium for the real or perceived productivity boost.
- foobarian 3y agoWhat about Azure revenues providing access to GPU resources?
- paxys 3y agoThat's all going to NVIDIA.
- snowwrestler 3y agoMicrosoft’s biggest lines of business support knowledge work (Windows, email, Office, MS365, etc) and AI is looking it will provide a nice productivity bump to knowledge workers. Even just building AI into existing products could help justify price increases, offset on the customer side by higher productivity. In plain English: AI means companies will need fewer knowledge workers per unit revenue and MS will have a strong claim on some of those additional profits if they are supplying the AI (even if they are reselling OpenAI).
- tiffanyh 3y agoBill Gates, at time of IPO owned 49% of Microsoft. If he hadn’t sold his stock, he’d be worth ~$1.5 Trillion To put that into context, he'd be worth 6x Elon Musk (who's the current riches person-in-the-world) https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire-today-163852659.html#:~:text=The%20narrative%20begins%20with%20Microsoft's,stands%20at%20approximately%20%242.805%20trillion https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire....
- paxys 3y agoBut there would be a shit ton more polio in the world, so I'll accept that tradeoff.
- tiffanyh 3y agoLarry Ellison still today owns 42% of Oracle. What he does instead is take out loans against his stock. Bill could have done the same and still fund all his philanthropy. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/lawrence-j-ellison/#:~:text=The%20majority%20of%20Ellison's%20fortune,company's%20September%202022%20proxy%20statement https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/lawrence-j-e....
- huytersd 3y agoMan I love Bill Gates so much. I know low effort posts are frowned here but I had to say it.
- meijer 3y agoYeah, but that would still have been a poor investment strategy. You have to manage the risk. And you can only do that by looking forward, not backward.
- dartharva 3y agoWho knows, Microsoft probably wouldn't have reached its current heights if less people had enough stakes.
- amanzi 3y agoI'm no investor or financial analyst, but it appears to me that Microsoft have a diverse range of revenue (that don't necessarily depend on each other) with pretty good lock-in with their products (not easy switching away from M365 once you've gone all-in with it). Apple on the other hand still have most of their revenue coming from iPhones with the next biggest coming from services which stems mostly from the iPhone sales. There's some lock-in with the iPhone, especially in the US, but it's pretty easy to switch from iPhone to Android and still have access to the same apps and services (apart from the Apple-specific iMessage/FaceTime). I don't know how much this affects stock prices, but it does seem like if you're investing in Apple, you're investing in the success of the iPhone. Obviously that's been a safe bet over the last 10 years, but nothing lasts forever.
- ephemeral-life 3y ago> Microsoft have a diverse range of revenue This is probably the bingo statement. Everyone has seen the layoff's recently. Markets are expected to take a turn for the worse. In such a situation, a highly diversified company would be perceived as more valuable than a high-end consumer brand.
- CommanderData 3y agoApple needs to become a player in the cloud space. OS agnostic just like the other three big players. It's a big mistake they didn't invest in the space earlier.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThat's an absurdly vague declaration. What do you want them to do "in the cloud space?"
- cryptos 3y agoDo you really think that it would be a good fit? Apple is mostly a hardware company, although this hardware obviously needs some software and a part of it runs in the cloud these days. But at least my impression is that they are not really in the B2B market with professional services. To enter the cloud market they are pretty late to the game ...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoSad. Microsoft, after advancing the state of consumer-oriented computing more than anyone else through the '90s, is now a despicable anti-customer troll. Nothing epitomizes that more than the reduction of all users to a goddamned "Microsoft account" that nobody wants. You can't use or even install Windows now unless you do so as a "Microsoft account," lest you be hounded day and night to log in, log IN, LOG IN WITH YOUR "MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!!!!" Office365 is subscription trash with hopelessly inept UI. Windows itself is a depressing shitshow of UI defects and... I was going to say half-baked... but in reality NO ideas. I was a professional developer on Windows from the days of separate 16- and 32-bit versions of Visual C++, eventually leading what was (according to Microsoft, as far as they knew) the largest Visual C++ project of the early/mid-'90s. You could have called me an evangelist for most of their products. I continued using Visual Studio until the mid-2000s, even while working at Apple. Today I don't have a single installation of Windows running in my home (which is also my business). I'm a pilot, and I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but not even that is enough to get me to buy an Intel box and tolerate the disgusting abuse that is being a Microsoft Windows user. There's simply no excuse for the execrable state of Windows, Microsoft's other product offerings, and the way they treat users. Fuck Microsoft.
- dartharva 3y agoMicrosoft was never consumer-oriented, it was always a B2B/Enterprise-catering firm. They only tolerate retail customers because they don't want us getting used to something else.
- chucke1992 3y agoAnd that's before AI really took off + their attempts to enter search and ad business + before they have started producing their own ARM chips enmasse.
- sle81 3y agoWorth noting that Microsoft has taken real steps to diversify their leadership and BoD compared to Apple which remains largely white and male.