I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers.
Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since.
In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!
Not related to StackExchange using .net per se, but it just occurred to me that, if MSFT were to buy StackExchange (along with GitHub, LinkedIn, Skype which they already have bought, and wasn't there a story about MSFT having a stake in npmjs, Inc. as well?), they'd own an awful lot of what defines developer productivity and developer/customer relationship in this decade.
You're not wrong, but Microsoft was in a position where they could invest over a period of _many_ years, if not a bit more than a decade, to get to a point of 53% market share. I don't think fb/meta has that kind of time - Microsoft was able to do all that while their core business (selling licenses to enterprise customers) either held steady or grew.
I have to wonder how much investing in some of today's tech behemoths comes down to viewing them more as a holding company / investment firm and less about their original core products. Microsoft has lost tons of desktop share over the last decade, this should have been a death signal for them but instead amazing acquisitions like Mojang, GitHub, ActBliz have pushed them to an amazing market cap. Similar with FB loosing use as a social media platform but staying in business with Instagram/WeChat etc.
I wouldn't bet on it. How many people on HN would recommend investing in MSFT? Close to none. And yet Microsoft is still unrivaled cash machine of tech world.
Well said. I am 100% with you on this. At the time of the internet bubble MSFT share was around $60 and it been more than 13 years now and still no luck as far as shares are concern. I guess the best Microsoft product so far is XBOX/XBOX360. Windows was suppose to be huge but I guess gone are those days.
I’m not OP, but Microsoft is one of a handful of stand out tech companies for me. They are paying a decent dividend (almost unheard of in tech) and have a very solid enterprise product lineup that has gained traction, with a huge amount of the market left. Furthermore they have a strong consumer and gaming footprint, and generally are positioned well across their entire portfolio.
Not a negative comment in the thread so far. That's amazing for something Microsoft, as anyone who's been around here can attest. There's a corner being turned here; time to buy MSFT?
Back when I was still a cool kid, the biggest worry for a lot of companies was Microsoft deciding to enter your space. Bottomless war chest, an army of programmers and a finely tuned sales channel meant that all their new initiatives started at +20 points.
SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. If they didn't have it, they bought a company that did have it - and then used their 800lbs of brute market muscle to make it into the dominant offering.
If one looks at a graph of MS stock from 1986-2000 and compares that to 2000-2009 it shows the stock has basically languished. MS is a cash cow, slowly dying. They were the first and perhaps only company ever able to successfully leverage large network effects and create a proprietary lock-in model that has enabled them to dominate the desktop for a long time. Moreover it's so dominant that the only thing now worse than Office is Google Docs :)
Their business practices, particularly with respect to extortionary illegal contracts with hardware manufacturers were only finally stopped with a government anti-trust suit against them.
Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough shit because you can't fix it.
But you can relax, you are correct. They were never able to "own" the net and they don't own the pipes (which I've read is the real reason Buffett never invested in MSFT, he's a very long investor).
Please don't think ill of those who lived through those years. About three years ago now I swore off windoze for good and my health has improved considerably. I truly hope others have that same opportunity.
I might be early, I often am, but if you have the stomach for it I'd say MSFT is a good short, even if you like the stock it can be just as profitable on the way down as it was for those on the way up :)
Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well.
I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it.
It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.
Fair enough; I understand that point of view, and even had it myself, to some degree. But I also think that has little to do with MSFT. The same would be said if SF, or Amazon, or (insert any other large corp) would have bought them.
I also think GitHub, essentially, positioned themselves that way. However, that, if viewed a bit cynically, could easily be seen as just marketing or PR.
I like Microsoft, but as a disclaimer before my analysis - I bought 400 shares of Microsoft stock a little bit ago at $25.79 per share.
Here my thoughts:
-Microsoft's price/earnings ratio is around 10, which I feel is pretty good for a company with a lot of stable revenue base and a chance at upside.
-This article talks about Microsoft's poor performance in tablets, which is true and worrying. I'm not sure Microsoft will make that ground up. They do have an excellent research division, though, and I'm wondering if they can make a strong showing in the next generation of technology after this. I don't know what that'll be, but new input devices should be coming online. The Kinect is amazing, I was really blown away playing with one in Singapore. If Microsoft can build on that to do alternative input and the next generation, they could have a huge renaissance.
-They have a very solid installed base. Government and business are very likely to keep running on Windows and Office. For consumers, even if tablets totally take over - and I'm not sure that'll happen - late adoptors will be buying those pre-installed Windows laptops and PCs just like always.
-$50 billion in cash reserves means they've got a lot of time to figure something out going forwards. Lots of cash + some very stable covering their fixed costs + big research division = seemingly a pretty safe buy with some upside.
I don't think it's a good stock to buy for short term appreciation - it might well go down over the next 2-3 years. But I'm comfortable holding it for 10 years. I think there's a decent shot it pays well in dividends and holds its value and a decent shot for lots of growth and appreciation.
Of course, maybe the house does fall over. Do your own research, etc, etc, etc.
Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since.
In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!
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