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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.
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.
A fool and his money...
I hate to break it to you but Amazon still has a huge fucking lead on cloud market share. It's not even close.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
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
..and Amazon will likely retain its lead in supporting large and/or public facing websites.
But there's a lot of businesses, usually non-IT focused ones, who will remain Microsoft shops. For them, hosting their internal, B2B, and smaller public applications on Azure makes a lot of sense, and it's going to be a growth area for MS for a while. Yes you can host your .NET applications lots of places, but all the Azure nonsense is baked into Visual Studio and so, to the extent it basically works, it's going to be the path of least resistance for a lot of people.
In a lot of ways, MS is in a different market than other cloud vendors.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Fair point. I would expect most Microsoft shops to ultimately go with Azure for the reasons you outlined.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
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.
For most people, the cloud offers convenience at the expense of a bunch of negatives that aren't immediately apparent to them, mostly relating to data security, data charges, and stability of software usability (ie unexpected workflow killing changes).
The reality is that their personal data needs are meager enough not to warrant datacenter storage and processing. It's just that those who want to charge monthly fees for every little thing are trying to squeeze the market in that direction.
So what? There can be more than one winner in the cloud market. It's obvious Microsoft doesn't care about the Windows market anymore though, given that each release gets worse and worse.