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.

Comments

Re: Bubble, idiot

[lgw]

The thing is: "desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools" isn't a growing market any more, and MS is losing pricing power there as technology evolves. E.g., Word was one the killer app, but if you share documents online instead of in print, Word has no real value. XL and PPT have staying power, but MS is starting to offer them on other platforms, so the OS lock-in isn't what it was.

If MS has a future, it's in the server space, They're trying to make Azure competitive with AWS, but right now it's still small in comparison, and most of the Azure business is existing MS sever companies moving to Azure for a deep discount. Almost no one is starting new companies or projects with the back-end in Azure.

They might yet pull it out, thanks to all the market presence they have to work with, but unless something changes they're doomed to a gradually shrinking base of established customers, much like Oracle. I do expect they'll outlive Oracle, though, since MS only pisses off their customers, while Oracle pisses on them.