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Microsoft Could Be First Tech Company To Reach Trillion-Dollar Market Value: Analyst (geekwire.com)
Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn could help the Redmond company become the first technology giant to reach a market value of $1 trillion, or so thinks a notable analyst. Analyst Michael Markowski believes that Microsoft will be able to leverage LinkedIn to become a leader in social media space and the emerging crowdfunding platform. So much so that it will beat Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in becoming the first company to hit $1 trillion market value. From a report on GeekWire: Here are the market caps of these big tech companies as of Monday morning: Apple: $622.6B, Alphabet: $549.7B, Microsoft: $489.3B, Amazon: $358.7B, and Facebook: $337.6B. "The public has an insatiable appetite for making small bets and purchasing lottery tickets, etc., that provide the chance to make a big profit," Markowski wrote. "The millennials will be a good example. Many will want to routinely invest $100 or even less into high-risk ventures that could produce returns of 10X to 100X." Microsoft, through LinkedIn, will be able to take advantage of this trend because it has a monopoly on the business social media sphere. Markowski predicts that all the big tech companies will eventually build services to facilitate crowdfunding investments.
Should any company have this much capitalisation when there are people living homeless on the streets? Capitalism is good, but it needs restraints and balance, because at the moment whoever holds the money makes the rules.
... ought to be enough market capitalization for anyone.
History lesson for the newbies here
It's a bubble, idiot. The only place where people expect to see "returns" is in equities and futures. MicroShaft is no more valuable today than it was ten years ago. I would argue that it is worth A LOT LESS. Just wait till it pops.
So now gambling is a special millennial trait?
Microsoft's buying-into-a-market-history makes it much more likely that this predicts the demise of social media as we know it. Either the bubble will burst, or something new/better will come along.
Or is it a shell game? Who is expected to take an article like that seriously?
The 1990's called and want their dial-up modems back.
Are they still a thing?
Apple almost has that much money in the bank.
Amazon is primed for the strongest growth, they completely control online shopping and they're dominating cloud services. Microsoft is second in the cloud but it's a very distant second.
I'll put them above Google though.
this is a joke, right? they haven't been able to do that since QDOS... and even then, that was only because they already had a buyer and they needed something to deliver on a short turnaround. that also started microsoft's long history of fucking over the little guy.
Does anyone else see this as a problem? We should break up companies that are this large, these for-profit mega corporations are a detriment to the public.
Think of all the poor people that can be helped with that much money.
Or stock market shill. He must own (or have options on) Microsoft and/or LinkedIn shares.
227-3517
The last time we had this much debt and high market valuations was last decade. This time around instead of homes the junk derivitives are car loans, payday centers, and other places. I read it is over 2 trillion in bad car loans that are flipped each year as poor folks with low credit like my boss with a 550 score can get a $30,000 truck no money down no problem ... still at %22 interest though. Foreign debt as well in the EU with bonds for countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain.
Add to this the market valuations and a dangerous president (please Republican viewers this is not a liberal rant) who is anti globalization & china and a possible broken up EU with France and Italy possible leaving it if more far alt-right leaders get elected and I predict a disaster!
The only thing keeping us afloat it seems is China and people flipping things and offshoring debt. Once tarrifs come into play again with Trump and a falling apart of the EU if La Penne and Germany's future alt-right leader leave will stop the gravy train and the cards will collapse.
What do you all think?
http://saveie6.com/
Everything MS produces has value to our everyday lives. Unfortunately, most of it is negative value.
Are they still a thing?
Obviously the answer is yes.
LinkedIn is a piece of useless shit. If Microsoft is intending to build a juggernaut on that, they are delusional. I think I will send Bill Gates an endorsement for his cardiac surgery skills.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Hint: It is NOT superior software. At least not any way that I can define it, but perhaps I'm just too twisted in thinking that different people think differently and therefore a single superior solution does not exist?
Answer: It's the financial models.
Flogging the dead horse, but I still believe Linux remains essentially irrelevant because the financial models are bad, but I'm too tired of the fight to even often alternatives at this point... Unless someone encourages me, eh?
My interpretation of Microsoft's success is that there is almost no there (= innovation) there. Even the innovations in their financial models were copied, but at least in the financial models they substantially improved them:
(1) Legal evasion of liability via the EULA. If Microsoft were liable for the harms caused by their software then the company would have gone bankrupt long ago.
(2) Selling upstream to the makers, not downstream to the actual end users.
Just picking on what I regard as the two biggies, though if Microsoft does reach the trillion-dollar market cap, it will largely depend on stealing Apple's business models (more effectively than the google can steal them).
Still bogus in terms of solving any real problem. There is no number that is large enough to "solve" that kind of greed. That's why big companies have to become so EVIL these years, but I predict that Trump will figure out how to make the bad situation worse.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"Markowski predicts that all the big tech companies will eventually build services to facilitate crowdfunding investments."
Yeah because heaven forbid we ask the trillionaires of the world to actually pay for their own fucking shit.
"The public has an insatiable appetite for making small bets and purchasing lottery tickets, etc., that provide the chance to make a big profit," Markowski wrote. "The millennials will be a good example. Many will want to routinely invest $100 or even less into high-risk ventures that could produce returns of 10X to 100X..."
Find me a financial advisor that would ever equate buying fucking lottery tickets as an "investment".
Cut the bullshit and call it what it is; acts of desperation.
And it's no surprise Millennials are rather desperate. Not much to look forward to these days when monopolies with more money than most small countries have the unmitigated gall to turn to crowdsourcing to fund their ventures.
... adds value?
LinkedIn was hacked four years ago, and what initially seemed to be a theft of 6.5 million passwords has actually turned out to be a breach of 117 million passwords.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Does anybody actually use LinkedIn for anything? It seems to be the most useless social media company going.
I've had a LinkedIn account since they started and although I'm always typing in my LInkedIn credentials to connect my LinkedIn account to third parties, I've probably spent a grand total of six actual hours using LinkedIn. I use Facebook more than six hours per day.
Rarely does one large tech company acquiring another large tech company (both in terms of valuation) ever work. I foresee Microsoft dumping LinkedIn for $1 billion in 3 years, losing $25 billion in the process.
Does anybody use LinkedIn for anything but a backup location to park their resumes?
Many students and professionals use Microsoft products nowadays so why not?
> Should any company have this much capitalisation when there are people living homeless on the streets?
I totally agree. A bunch of people shouldn't be allowed to pool their money and build a $9 billion semiconductor foundry until everyone has good jobs first. Nobody should be putting money into building factories while other people a aren't working. What good does building a billion dollar shipping port do for all those people needing work? How could investors spending $1.5 billion constructing a hospital complex possibly benefit the surrounding community?
Well come to think of it, a company with a billion dollars of capital, or a trillion dollars, is probably paying a few people. Maybe Microsoft does write $10 billion in pay checks every year. Maybe it's kinda good to have hospitals, including specialist facilities that attract people from all over the world to come get treatment in your city (and pay for it in your city).
Maybe when TSMC invested $9.3 billion in their latest fab, most of that $9.3 billion ended up as some schmuck's paycheck - from the construction workers who framed the buildings to the people pulling cable through it and the engineers designing the various machinery that fabs the wafers.
It occurs to me that Ethiopia, Niger, and Bangladesh don't have any big companies doing big projects, and they're among the poorest countries in the world. The big companies are in the United States, the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland both nominally and actually - which happen to be the richest countries in the world. Maybe having big, big companies building really big projects has SOME advantages.
But what's missing is that Joe Blow like you and I should be able to get a piece of the action. Instead of some king or whatever owning a semiconductor fab or a shipping port facility by spending a billion of THEIR money to build it, we should all be allowed to get a little piece of the ownership, and a little piece of the profit, by chipping in a little bit of the money to build it. I should be able to chip in $29, and you chip in $290 or whatever. A million people could each put in a little bit and we'll split the profits fairly, based on how much we put in. THAT would be cool. It should be open to any member of the public who wants to participate. We could call it a "public company". Wouldn't it be cool if you could own a piece of TSMC right now for $29? Maybe you could pitch in $60 and become an owner of Microsoft.
You can get your share of TSMC profits for $29, of course, or buy a share of Microsoft for $60. Half the people on Slashdot do. Some people don't realize that they can, because nobody ever explained it to them in an understandable way. Some people know that they CAN, but prefer to instead spend that $60 buying something FROM Microsoft, such as an XBox controller, rather than using their $60 buy MICROSOFT. That's fine if that's what they want to do, of course. A few people are really silly - they decide to spend their money buying FROM Microsoft, then whine and complain that I decided to invest my money buying Microsoft - becoming an owner. They keep whining and they keep being broke buying Xbox and Starbucks lattes. That works fine for me because instead of buying lattes for a month I bought Starbucks stock - the silly people are paying ME $8 for a cup flavored water and milk. Kinda makes me wanna shout at them though "buy the company, not the coffee, and you won't be broke anymore dummy."
Fag.
Think Microsoft's products are largely shoddy and worse than alternatives.
This is a pretty impressive milestone as a failure of capitalism, I hope we feel it's full import and act accordingly.
I'm not quite sure what the guy that wrote this article is smoking, but there is pretty much no way LinkedIn is going to push MSFT above the $1 trillion mark. Sure the only thing he claims at that MSFT will make $1 trillion before Apple or Alphabet, but at current growth rates none of those companies are going to be in the ball park of $1 trillion valuation for 5-10 years at least, probably longer. It seems unlikely that LinkedIn is the killer acquisition that is going to drive their growth for the next decade (as opposed to all the license revenue they make from existing established business.)
MSFT's current market value is $491.71 billion. Hypothetically, lets say that being acquired by MSFT does not change the value of LinkedIn at all, if that casepost-merger MSFT would be worth... $491.71 billion, they paid $26 billion in stock + cash for LinkedIn reducing the value of MSFT by $26 billion, then the value of LinkedIn ($26 billion) gets added to their market cap, cancelling out the two effects. Now lets say they double the value of LinkedIn by giving it access to their network of enterprise customers, they MSFT's value becomes $491.71 + $26 = $517.71 billion... a 5% increase in the value of MSFT.
I'm sorry, there is just no plausible scenario where LinkedIn suddenly becomes worth more than the entire rest of MSFT is worth. There is no way LinkedIn is going to double the amount of license revenue they generate. That's the problem that enormous businesses like MSFT have... for almost any other business an extra $500 million of quarterly revenue would be an enormous new windfall that would double their stock's value. For MSFT... it would be an extra 2% growth of quarter revenue, to which Wall Street would yawn and say "Here's your gold star MSFT, stock is up 2% after quarterly earnings." Its hard to create big new percentage growth when all the new technologies are not worth anywhere close to your existing massive business. MSFT's partner Intel has also been facing this problem for over a decade. Just like any other company, Apple and Google are not immune to this and are starting to hit the wall that the burden of massive valuation begets. Any company in this position more or less is forced in to paying dividends and becoming a boring "blue chip" stock. Nothing wrong with it really, take the example of 3M, a diversified technology company that has been a stable steady company. They have increased dividend rates every year for over a century now, and their stock holds strong value long term. I think the tech industry as a whole needs to wake up to the fact that we are rapidly turning in to that type of old but strong and steady business.
Wake up: The job of financial analysts is to pump up the market by getting people to invest in it. It's not to give useful advice, or to be right, or to report the truth or anything related to the truth. They are part of the infotainment media segment and their target market is the greedy, fearful, foolish, and ignorant individual investor.
Analysts always say that the future is great.They may occasionally say that one company is less then stellar. They mostly do this to give the false impression that they know something. Of course there is the small contingent that says that everything is just a heartbeat away from going to hell, but they are just the mirror image of the "it's all swell" crowd. Neither group has any proven capacity to predict what will happen. Just look at the disclaimers they all attach to the swill they all spew out.
Anyone who has a handle on how the market, or a specific stock, will perform will never tell the likes of you. They will keep it to themselves and make a killing or advise the people with real wealth and also make a killing.
Remember, you are the sucker in this game. To assume anything else is egomania. The deck is stacked and the house makes a guaranteed profit. And when they screw up the taxpayers (i.e. not the wealthy) pick up the tab.
If you want to see how things really work watch The Big Short. It's a really good movie with some great performances. It will make you laugh until you realize that nothing has changed since 2008. They same greedy assholes are still running the game for their own profit, but now it is going to be much, much worse. The asshats that Trump puts in place will make Greenspan and Paulson seem like financial Einsteins, rather then the architects of the biggest crash since the Great Depression.
Why is Snark Required?
I don't care how much thye make, Microsoft has fucked over customers with Win10. It is the shittiest OS I have ever seen. Nadella, you are a fucking piece of shit and I really hope you die a painful death.
It's clear that no one has learned anything from the 2008 financial crisis. There was all this talk of "too big to fail". In the end, that hasn't even been applied to the banking sector, but frankly, it applies to any company. Beyond a certain size, the existence of a huge company becomes arguably detrimental to society as a whole. Too much power, too much influence, too many subsidiaries that appear independent, but actually aren't, and can work together to influence markets.
Any organization* above size "X" should be forced to split or divest. We can discuss what size "X" is, but it is certainly far, far below $1 Trillion. Note that the largest banks in the world (which are certainly "too big") are only a quarter of that size.
* As a small-"L" libertarian: I think this limit should apply to governments as well. No government should be allowed revenue above a certain level - this would limit the scope of national governments and force power down to the local level.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
ZZ
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Maybe it's because your lives aren't valuable at all.
Eh, whatever
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think that was the original reason for public companies to exist. Unfortunately, any real investment is now so far abstracted from shareholders that it barely registers. On one side are the investment banks doing high frequency trading and demanding constant increased revenue, and on the other are the intermediate mutual funds, hedge funds and others that own most of a public company's shares. Individual investors have very little to do with a company's success -- most hot tech stocks don't even pay dividends and they have to make their profits by selling when the price gets pumped up. Public companies don't answer to their individual shareholders -- they have to please their institutional ones and have to make short term, employee-unfriendly and consumer-hostile decisions as a result. Founder CEOs who care about their companies often end up getting pushed out because of this.
A good recent example of this is Citrix. I work in airline IT, where XenApp is being increasingly used to make Windows deployments simpler. I also know lots of healthcare IT workers -- XenApp/XenDesktop is basically the only choice in app delivery for hospitals. They have a massive customer base, fiercely loyal customers and a huge bench of people who specialize in XenApp. Plus, almost every electronic health records application is a fat, bloated mess requiring massive processor and RAM to run - basically all of them are hack jobs and need to run on server-class hardware. Given that, you would think Citrix would be happy raking in licensing fees like Microsoft does -- it is not cheap software. Nope! An "activist investment" firm (Elliott Management) bought them a few years back, threw out the CEO (who founded the company)then cut development funding to the bone and started piecing out the company for sale. It took a few messy releases of their core products to convince the new owners to start reinvesting resources in them. The tech press was posting stories wondering what big healthcare companies would do without a stable Citrix product.
It all boils down to the short term nature of thinking that public companies are forced into by the market. This is terrible for long term stability, but great if you're trying to pump up the stock price for a quick sale. It's always been there, but the increased speed of the market has brought it to a point where no public company can do anything the investors see as long term investment. Lowering the barriers to individual investors is just a tiny fraction of the problem -- it used to be a huge expensive pain to buy or sell a stock so people bought for the long term. The other problem is that so many people have their retirements tied up in the market more directly. When it was insurance companies and pension funds doing most of the investing, there was a lot more room for error and time to make up for mistakes. Now, a single screw up doesn't get averaged out over time, so there's constant pressure for unsustainable growth. I almost want to see something even more abstract than a mutual fund offered for long term investors so that companies have some breathing room and don't make decisions that kill them in the long run.
This analyst makes Microsoft gaining over $500B in market cap seem so easy. It can't be that easy or there would be plenty of companies up in the stratosphere. Right now, Microsoft barely makes half the revenue of Apple. I'm a believer in anything being able to happen with the stock market because there are so many crooks in that system. I've heard analysts say Amazon would reach $1T in market cap. I've heard them say Alphabet will reach $1T in market cap. They make it seem so easy for a company to make that mark despite the fact it has never been done before. I say, let the analysts have their fun misleading naive investors. Even if those analysts are seriously wrong they won't have to take any responsibility for people losing money. I can see Microsoft is doing quite well in terms of share gains but their P/E is a bit on the high side. Microsoft shareholders are very lucky considering Windows sales aren't all that robust and their mobile initiative is pretty much dead. Microsoft took a fairly deep charge for Nokia's losses and shareholders didn't even care. I guess if shareholders have faith in a company, it can do no wrong. Linked-In never seemed like a big money-making company, so I'm not sure what Microsoft got for $26B. However, now that Microsoft has it, all these people are claiming Linked-In going to earn Microsoft a huge amount of money. Maybe I'm just stupid but I really don't understand what makes Linked-In such a great company/division. Now Microsoft is constantly being praised for its Azure cloud services but I thought they still trailed behind Amazon's cloud services. Whatever. Wall Street absolutely loves "The Cloud."
I've been using Apple products since 2004 and with the neutering of the pro lines I'm not looking forward to another Apple purchase. Fanboyism only will get them so far and they don't have another Steve Jobs
Amazon could hit this easily with a dominant market position.
Here are some "technology" companies' market caps for comparison:
ORCL : 159.57B
FB : 340.64B
AMZ : 366.88B
MSFT : 493.07B
GOOG : 551.72B
AAPL : 626.46B
Looks like Microsoft would have to grow by more than 25% just to catch up to Apple. So I guess this "analyst" thinks LinkedIn will make that much difference, then also somehow create an additional Facebook's worth of value for shareholders too?
Meh. This kind of crap prediction is why I buy index funds.
Z^3
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^4
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"could be"
could also file for bankruptcy
Happy New Year
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
1. Tax Corporation Revenues, Not Profits;
2. Regulate Market Capitalization of Corporations;
To empower entrepreneurs and to create millions of new jobs;
Casteism
Progress has to come from technical developments, at least if people invest in technology that moves humanity forward in a sustainable manner. So for as long as these large companies use their money well, and don't just stash it away, there shouldn't be an issue. In the end, you do need capital to develop the technology that lifts people out of poverty. It's technology that drives down the cost of building houses, making cars, growing food, etc.. As long as they don't just make a few individuals very wealthy, but invest their money, there is no issue.
The risks with extremely rich companies in a corrupted world is that their capital gives them power and influence. Their CEOs and directors have a large impact in the world we live in, and I think that's the real problem. In stead of a democracy (or demo-crazy), you'll end up with a corpocracy.
Z^5
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.