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Microsoft Shares Hit All-Time High As Company Strengthens Its Cloud Grip (usatoday.com)
Marco della Cava, reporting for USA Today: Microsoft shares surged 5% in early trading Friday, and passed a high set in 1999, helped by enthusiasm for progress in its cloud business. The stock was at up at $60.11, breezing past the $58.72 mark set in December 1999. Friday's rally follows Microsoft's latest quarterly report, out late Thursday, that beat analyst expectations for adjusted sales and profit and showcased a doubling of growth in its Azure cloud business, while reflecting continued strain from consumers' pivot away from PCs and traditional software purchases.Microsoft reported its Q1 2017 earnings yesterday, noting a revenue of $20.5 billion, which was higher than Wall Street's expectations. Company's Intellgent Cloud revenue was up 8 percent, whereas Azure revenue observed 116 percent growth year-on-year.
How did this happen? Everyone on Slashdot knows that Micro$oft is a dead worthless company that doesn't provide any value to anyone. Who needs cloud when I can host my own super awesome Linux box in my parent's basement? I guess Micro$oft managed to fool the stupid plebs in corporate IT.
It's an all-time high! Eat weed!
Why does anyone care about revenue? I look at the operating income and both in cloud and in general, Microsoft is making considerably (several hundreds of millions) less this year on its services than the year before.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
$58.72 in December 1999 = $85.09 in 2916 . . . All time high?
A fool and his money...
Didn't Microsoft split their stock in the early 2000's? If so, this article doesn't apply.
Can we please get real reporting from real journalists?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Since the PC is dying (right?) and is gonna make them less and less money they could've left Windows alone. Instead of that they had to turn it into a smartphone OS: Constantly spying the user, pushing ads and services upon the user abd pushing towars touch-first UIs.
They could've included the Win7 UI as a gesture to those of us who don't use our PC with a touchscreen.
At work I am forced to admin and use Microsoft's cloud offerings. We have moved EVERYTHING to the cloud except for set of servers for a proprietary service that has no cloud offering. I admin the Exchange, AD, SharePoint server, everything. We have a fat pipe and it's still slow. AWS still has the edge. I've tried convincing the powers that be that going this route is a matter of bad judgment. But like in the old days with IBM, no one got fired for buying Microsoft. I would have gone IBM and/or AWS in a heartbeat given the budget and latitude.
Having been a mainframe and *nix admin for many years, I can tell you that while some think the "cloud" is analogous to the mainframe notion of old, this doesn't translate well, if at all. The cloud is distributed, most mainframe installs were local albeit networked within their own companies, even if the offices were remote. I far and away prefer working on mainframes and minis compared to today's stuff. Nothing extant today beats an IBM Z-Series mainframe. Nothing. For example of how awesome these things are, the country of Kenya runs their entire power company needs on two of these Z-Series mainframes. I know, I know... old school, old fart stuff. Boring. Not even. If I ever get the chance to work on, with, around mainframes again, I'm jumping at the chance. I dearly miss "the priesthood of the computer" days. Now? Not so much.
You can't buy your software anymore, you just rent it. That means you can't just pay once and do whatever you want with that license -- you keep paying, forever (way more than you would have under the old "buy a copy of version x" model) and, being that this software is constantly phoning home to Microsoft, can be changed, cut off, etc. at their whim (as well as more easily hacked / hijacked). Adobe, Intuit, and others of the old desktop software brigade are all moving to this model. It's great for them because of the recurring cash flow, but exactly what is the benefit for the end user besides promised "upgrades"? Do we really need another version of Word (God no -- quit changing it and forcing us to re-learn your shitty interface!)? Did Generally Accepted Accounting Principles change that much that a new major version of QuickBooks is required every year? This should be a huge slam dunk opportunity for the open source desktop software community.
"Microsoft shares surged 5% in early trading Friday, and passed a high set in 1999"
Do you mean Microsoft shares are back at 1999 prices.
You got it in one, my friend. Nailed it.
People are too blind or too apathetic to see this. I've been in IT for 3 decades and I can tell you that we are heading down a fairly dangerous path where no one controls their own data, where it's housed, who has access. Any of these companies could be severely compromised despite their promise of at-rest encryption, moving encryption, employee background checks. None of this matters a whit if you are not in control of your data 24/7/365.
These cloud providers change software all the time. I've seen things break and cause companies great anguish. I'll work locally, backup locally, yet have a backup offsite in a location that I control. The butcher's bill for going all cloud is going to be very high one day.