4 ms·
Microsoft is much more diversified than that. They have entire consulting services and a world class research arm and many other things that Apple has no analog
by bmitc 3y ago
Microsoft is much more diversified than that. They have entire consulting services and a world class research arm and many other things that Apple has no analog of.
- bch 3y ago> world class research arm Honest question: does Wall Street care? In my experience, this is the kind of thing that’s (rightly or wrongly) considered a “cost center”, not a “profit center”.
- bonestamp2 3y agoI think you're right, investors don't really value the research arm until something profitable comes out of it and then they only value that thing that came out of it and not research arm itself. In some sense, that is the right move. For example, Intel was a market leader for decades while their research arm was very stagnant for many years too. Other times, it is short sighted not to price in what might be to come because you miss buying shares on the cheap before a huge technology/product leap.
- ephemeral-life 3y ago> does Wall Street care? Some people on wallstreet do. In Mckinsey's book Valuation, they make it pretty clear to the reader that companies who spend a lot on r&d tend to have outsized returns compared to their counterparts, who don't spend that much.
- bionsystem 3y agoI'd say the whole market gives a premium to companies with R&D spend, that's part of the reason why they have higher valuation metrics (alongside growth, margins and other quant factors). That is, when they are not stupidly burning it or giving it away as stock compensation.
- dataangel 3y agoIgnorant question: Does much actually make it out of MS Research? I've seen lots of interesting retrospectives on stuff that either failed or just has never come out of the lab (Singularity/Midori, accessibility demos showing phones reading restaurant menus to the blind, their tablet pre-ipad, etc.) but I don't think I know of anything they made that really grew up off the top of my head. I didn't want to say this without doing a little bit of homework so I checked their Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research) which doesn't list any accomplishments, just claims they have a lot of patents, and their main site has a publication index (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/?) but publication is not a good metric for ever seeing use.
- speps 3y agoBack in 2014 for the release of Kinect Sports Rivals, the tech to scan people and extract their body details into the right face shapes to match them with a virtual avatar. That came from MS Research Cambridge as far as I know. Here is a video of it demo'd: https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o
- breadwinner 3y ago> Does much actually make it out of MS Research? Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but as far as actual research output that has been commercialized, there is not much to show off.
- namaria 3y ago> there is not much to show off Except a 2.8 trillion dollar valuation at the top of the biggest stock market in the world.
- scns 3y agoIs Simon Peyton Jones still at Microsoft? He is is at Epic Games now IIRC. Lennart Poettering is there though last i heard.