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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.
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.
"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.
Some of us actually like not being tracked 24/7 and put action to our principles of privacy and living by the quality of our words, not merely reputation.
Feels like being a stranger in a strange land to see someone on a tech news site, someone that ought to know the virtues of anonymity, have a view so askew that they no longer understand why someone would be AC on principle. Doubly so for slashdot.
From the beginning up to about eight years ago the common wisdom was to be anonymous whenever you could. Now people posting since year one are treated as pariahs in one line while the next throws vitriol at Google, facebook, and the NSA for tracking everyone. Like a fat man dismissing his skinny doctor's advice on exercise.
I'm so sick of reading that horse shit that's coming from your mouth. Why the fucking Christ do I need an account? Does that somehow add some sort of official credibility? We all know that fake news never comes from named accounts!
I've been here since the slashdot early days and I still don't have an account.
> 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."