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Microsoft tops $4T in valuation: Great news for MSFT, not so great for workers
- anonymars 1y agoNot so thrilled as a customer either
- bediger4000 1y agoThere's never been a better time to leave either
- bix6 1y agoWhat is your business using instead of Excel?
- mschuster91 1y agoIf I were to guess some frankenstein SAP system
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago90% of the business just uses Sheets. There's a few accountants & finance people who still need Excel.
- andrewl-hn 1y agoDepends, really. My exposure to agriculture and manufacturing sectors says everyone is still on Office 365 and Excel while digital marketing and advertising are almost all using Gmail and Sheets. Though it may also be location-dependent. I'm describing Europe, other parts of the world may be very different.
- eitally 1y agoNot necessarily manufacturing. I led a Microsoft takeout at Sanmina (global high-tech contract mfr) all the way back in 2008-2009, and the result was 23,000 users moving to GSuite and mostly just Legal & Finance keeping Office as a fall-back only if LibreOffice wasn't sufficient. At the same time, several thousand Windows laptops were replaced with Chromebooks, and nearly all non-engineering workstations were replaced with ChromeOS devices or thin clients.
- bix6 1y agoSo you can’t migrate off then… and how is sheets (Google) better than Microsoft?
- kfajdsl 1y agoGoogle sheets
- bix6 1y agoYour accountants are using Google sheets?
- bongodongobob 1y agoNah. They are a dev and have no idea how the rest of the company works. They use Linux and sheets so obviously everyone else should be able to.
- epolanski 1y agoOrange and apples comparison. Sure, they are both fruits, that's where it ends.
- the__alchemist 1y agoDon't mave many options on the OS front. Windows performance gets worse and worse, increasing risk of corp enshittification, my task manager stopped working recently, but... I find Linux's workflow too rooted in multi-user systems and servers.
- alexjplant 1y ago> I find Linux's workflow too rooted in multi-user systems and servers. Out of genuine curiosity (not *nix/OSS fanboying) - how so? macOS has been a BSD for a quarter of a century and modern Windows was designed by a guy who cut his teeth at DEC on VMS. Virtually all modern computer OSes have roots in time-sharing systems.
- the__alchemist 1y agoThe user and permissions system. I struggle with things being set up on the root account vs user and vice versa, occasionally breaking my system by editing config files or with CLI commands. Did that a few weeks ago trying to get my PC to read USB-serial without launching the program from CLI with sudo+pw. I had an extra newline in one of the config files; it didn't like that! I cannot follow the decision-making logic that I would need sudo to talk to my embedded device. I've heard the explanations about connected storage devices, but I cannot agree with it. On windows, the same hardware, and same source code (compiled to a different ABI) just works, because its permission system is not so strict.
- bediger4000 1y agoIt's indisputable that Dave Cutler designed both VMS and NT. But Cutler hasn't been involved in years, maybe decades. I'm not a Windows guy, but I am curious. It looks to me like modern Windows has gotten well away from any Cutler design. Has modern Windows retained any Cutler style design?
- swarnie 1y agoIf i could even find a comparable OS/Productivity/Communications package to replace the existing i'd lose my own job for proposing it.
- bongodongobob 1y agoSure, just let me run this multimillion dollar multi-year project past management. Reasoning? "Lol M$ is sux"
- missedthecue 1y agoTheir Azure customer service is beyond atrocious. I have 6 days old completely untouched tickets on their paid support plan.
- mikestew 1y agoWell, maybe not so great for ex-workers. Current employees still have RSUs and employee stock purchase plan, so those shares are making bank. OTOH, my Microsoft-employed spouse also says "no significant pay raises this review period", and I think that's the "not so great for workers" part that TFA missed. MSFT is going big guns, but doesn't have money for increased compensation.
- knuppar 1y agoRetention was never a priority at MS. Lower comp compared to G/Meta/Amazon, no refreshers, poor special stock awards, tenure-based promo queue, (...). If RTO becomes a reality I think the calculus of staying at MS will be tipped over for many.
- theflyinghorse 1y agoIn this economy the calculus will be “hold on to your job at all costs and hope that next round of quarterly layoffs hiring doesn’t touch you”
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mikestew 1y agoOver 25 years ago MSFT was doing the same thing. Amazon, Google, and Facebook didn't yet exist, so we were losing candidates to Oracle because MSFT paid so little. When Microsoft finally wiped the sleep from their eyes, my next review period saw me getting a 23% raise at review time, some from performance and a lot from Microsoft finally catching up to the rest of the industry because they couldn't hire anyone (I'd say it was also a demonstration of how badly I was getting screwed, but MSFT options were hot back then). Will it happen again a generation later? Depends on how many candidates go to Amazon instead, I guess.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoGoogle did the same thing about 15 years ago. Universal 10% raises one year.
- mgh2 1y agorelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44778541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44778541
- mg 1y agoIf Nadella grows Microsoft into the AI era as fast as Gates did in the Desktop era, it would become a 100 trillion dollar company within the next ten years: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marek-gibney_microsofts-story-so-far-stock-price-on-activity-7159201072983506944-vmIq https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marek-gibney_microsofts-story...
- pizzathyme 1y agoThat number seems completely arbitrary. Why not $10 trillion or $1 quadrillion?
- mg 1y agoBecause, as can be seen in the chart, during the desktop era, Microsoft grew at 60% per year. Growing at 60% per year for ten years is a factor of slightly over 100.
- delecti 1y agoMicrosoft's overall value was also much more tied to their performance in the desktop market. The whole company can grow at 60% yoy if 60% of the company doubles in value. AI is not bringing them any revenue, and double nothing is still nothing.
- saulpw 1y agoThere is only $500T wealth in the entire world. You're saying in 10 years, Microsoft will be worth 15-20% of the entire world?!
- mg 1y agoI did not make any prediction. I made a calculation. About the market cap of MS if it grows into the AI era as fast as it grew into the Desktop era. You seem to assume that the global wealth is static. If that is the case, how were those $500T created in the first place?
- ryaniscool 1y agoIs it <waves hands towards the sky> AI? or is it years of overhiring? There was a great article I found on HN recently about how the recent layoffs in big tech are actually the result of overhiring for years in a talent arms race. Like, is AI now doing the former work of 25,000 people at Microsoft? Probably not.
- pm90 1y agoAlmost certainly not AI, just more users going from hosted windows solutions to azure + office upsell (eg with Teams). Microsoft pretty much dominates the non Apple Desktop ecosystem and is used heavily by healthcare, defense and manufacturing industries.
- SilverElfin 1y agoNot so great news for smaller companies either. MS continues to use their muscle to gain from each super cycle without having to work for it the way smaller companies do. Their size alone makes competition unfair.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoCompanies shouldn't ever be allowed to be so wealthy or powerful. This sort of power allows them to bypass legal regulations, squash small companies (something MS has been doing for a long time), force technology on people faster than they can react (think of the average clueless user that will just use anything MS puts on Windows), and create a true state of anti-competition (what kind of small company can compete with MS and not be bought out). The only reason why they do exist is because the people with the money are the people with the power.
- betaby 1y ago> Companies shouldn't ever be allowed to be so wealthy or powerful. I see MS as a US gov approved monopoly. I didn't check their SEC filings, but I suspect that US gov is a number one buyer, while various EU countries combined make number two. That's a coercion to me, not software business.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoI would agree with that. And if that is so, it makes it even more apparent how broken our system is. The United States after all was built on decent values but without mechanisms to safeguard the average American from the interplay and long-term effects of very advanced technology interacting with the free market economy.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoI wonder if a more-organized democracy would buy them out and make them state-owned. Terms like - You won, Windows is very popular, we are going to buy it and open source it, no more ads, no more opt-out telemetry - Same with Office - Same with Github - Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular - XBox and Kinect and all the hardware stuff can stay private since it's not a monopoly and not de-facto public infrastructure I wish I could live to see government that is both good and powerful, you know
- vouaobrasil 1y agoThat sounds like a good partial solution. Unfortunately, it's easier for governments to use tax dollars to expand, create more comfortable positions for federal civil servants, and watch the money roll in.
- sylens 1y agoAs someone who has been looking to lessen my reliance on all things Microsoft, the hardest thing for me to quit has been C# and .NET. It's just a great combination of developer experience, speed, and features. It's also probably the least problematic part of Microsoft to continue using, but it still doesn't feel great.
- jjice 1y agodotnet has gone pretty open source these days, no? I guess it may depend on the rest of your environment - maybe the Windows specific stuff like forms and WPF are still under them? Other than that, I think you don't need too much dependence on them, depending on how you look at them controlling it. It being OSS personally gives it more stability since it can always be forked if they pull some nonsense.
- int_19h 1y agoThe tooling isn't all open source. VSCode C# debugger isn't, for example.
- pllbnk 1y agoI am on the same boat but I'd say it does feel great since .NET belongs to .NET Foundation and is open source. Its development is very transparent too.
- fHr 1y agoMore H1B visas eh? Very bad for American tech workers.
- wonderwonder 1y agoCompound AI layoffs with outsourcing and its a dangerous time to be a software engineer in the US. I look at the current job environment with dismay. I really don't like my current role and it provides almost no benefit to my resume as i work in such a specialized niche industry but it pays well and I see no alternative. So I just clock in each day, do what i have to do and clock out dreading the next morning when I have to clock in again. I have maybe 2 years until this position winds down so am trying to do whatever I can to prepare for whats next.
- benreesman 1y agoInsulate your house with cash as much as possible, I understand better than most that saving is possible sometimes and not others, but to the degree possible? Stack it up. Cash on hand is leverage in tech employment just like anywhere, but amolified during periods of structural demand shift. If one can get a year or three of easy runway, one can reskill/upskill into stuff with demand shifting into it. Right now I'm screwing around with Jetson boards and stuff like that: LLMs may cone and go but robots are here to stay. And even the BATNA of "I'll go do OSS full time for a year" is leverage with your current employer. People with options are less likely to be fucked with in the first place.
- baal80spam 1y ago> its a dangerous time to be a software engineer in the US Eh - it's a dangerous time to be a software engineer anywhere.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44778541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44778541
- josefritzishere 1y agoMicrosoft would be so much more profitable if Satya Nadella left. His salary is over 48 million dollars.
- enigma101 1y agothese disgusting leeches. Microsoft is a parasite