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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.
... ought to be enough market capitalization for anyone.
History lesson for the newbies here
The 1990's called and want their dial-up modems back.
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/
MicroShaft is no more valuable today than it was ten years ago. I would argue that it is worth A LOT LESS.
Wrong. Microsoft has made vastly more profit in the last 10 years than before. And if you look at their revenue, they experienced an almost linear growth since 1995, going from 6 to 95 billions. They also have posted a profit every year since 1985, unlike Apple for instance who started making more money than Microsoft only in 2010.
By any standard, Microsoft is more valuable now than 10 years ago (which happens to be more or less the last period when calling them "MicroShaft" was somewhat clever).
lucm, indeed.
I think most people would say over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost their position as the market leader. In the consumer space in particular is difficult to see what role they have in the future.
The whole Safeway/Haggen thing is a fantastic tale of corporate greed and dishonesty; something one would expect from Big Oil or Big Tobacco but not from the place where one buys their Corn Flakes and ground beef (extra lean).
The Haggen people though they had found a good deal, but apparently when it comes down to grocery store mergers it's just like backroom poker games - if you don't know who's the mark it means you're it.
lucm, indeed.
no, only people that have a very narrow view of what the market is would say that. Microsoft have increased market share in enterprise many fold, they still hold a 90% desktop market share and make exponentially more money than they did 10 years ago and are one of the leaders in one of the largest growth areas of cloud and cloud services.
neither Microsoft or Apple executives are insanely paid. Last year Tim Cook made 10 millions, which is 3x less than the CEO of Discovery channel. I am not kidding.
Funny part is that the CEO of LinkedIn makes more than twice the salary of Satya Nadella. That must make for interesting lunch meetings (oh no Satya, let me get the bill...).
lucm, indeed.
I think most people would say over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost their position as the market leader.
Valuation is based on expected future profits, not market dominance. Anyway, Microsoft is clearly the market leader in desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools. They don't do well in phones and tablets, but that is a different market.
Also Windows 10 is just starting its money-making phase in the enterprise. Over the next year or two this will be a highly profitable segment for Microsoft. At the same time, SQL Server now runs on Linux (it can even run in Docker containers!) and this is going to make a serious dent in Oracle's market share, as many organizations have been waiting to escape the Oracle life-sucking contracts for a long time.
lucm, indeed.
I wonder if Microsoft will get a bailout like GM did?
GM got the bailout because they employed a lot of people, and paid "defined benefit" pensions to even more people. Microsoft employs far fewer, and has no DB pension program. Also, nearly half of Microsoft's employees are not Americans.
No, only people who fail to comprehend how much mobile is usurping the desktop PC would say that. It turns out that there are many roles in a corporation that don't require a PC. Fewer PCs means lower deployment, maintenance, license, and support costs.
No, only people who fail to comprehend how many of the small to medium sized businesses have switched to hosted Gmail (to my chagrin) instead of deploying MS Exchange would say that. Now, Gartner says that Azure is taking off, but Gartner says a lot of shit that doesn't pan out. Let's wait and see on that.
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.
Do those figures consider the enormous amount of stock Tim and Satya were gifted?
Yes. Tim Cook actual salary is around 1.7 millions. Many executive at Apple made more money than him this year but his existing stock options are worth a lot if Apple stock doesn't take a huge dive (which I predict it will within a year or two).
Amazingly at this point in time Marissa Mayer has been paid more to run Yahoo than Tim Cook has been paid to run Apple. She will also bank 100 millions from the last phase of her destruction of Yahoo while Tim Cook will only get his 300 millions in stock options if he manages to stay in charge for another year.
People who believe that the biggest crooks work on Wall Street need to think again. Marissa Mayer is making more money than the JP Morgan CEO.
lucm, indeed.
What on Earth would you be doing on Facebook for six hours a day?
Cat pics
Microsoft's high market valuation is solely the result of having issued billions of shares of stock.
That's not how it works. If anything, the more stock you sell the lower the price goes. That's why investors love when a company has a good buyback program.
This said, as a normal investor there are two typical ways to make money in the stock market.
1) buy low, sell high
2) hold a position and reap dividends
Assuming an investment made a year ago:
For scenario 1:
-> return on Apple stock: 10%
-> return on Microsoft stock: 13%
-> return on IBM stock: 20%
-> return on JC Penney stock: 47%
For scenario 2:
-> dividends on Apple stock: 2%
-> dividends on Microsoft stock: 2.5%
-> dividends on IBM stock: 3.2%
-> dividends on JC Penney stock: 0%
Now I'm pretty sure that's not what most people would have expected. But most people don't hold on stock for a long time nowadays, they tend to speculate and over time they lose their shirt because by the time the hype/panic reaches the normal investors, it's already too late. There's nothing wrong with speculation but it's closer to gambling than investment.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Microsoft is attempting to live off that hackneyed old model of parachuting in consultants to enterprises who they feel are too stupid to "get" cloud on their own. They'll sell them expensive services to help those dinosaurs forklift ancient applications onto the cloud until those enterprises mature (or simply die) and figure out that they can get what they actually need (and at a significantly more reasonable cost) with AWS and Google.
> 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."
Apple is only worth 25% more than MS. MS earnings grew in 2016, while Apple's shrank. MS has a clear path for growth: Azure might actually take off one day. Apple doesn't really: the mobile market is saturated, and they need a wholly new product line to return to fast growth (which, admittedly, they've done before, but it's not clear what that would be).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Might want to get ready to munch some QWERTY... AAPL has about a 19% net profit margin. Google around 22%. Microsoft is at 23%. Microsoft actually makes more net profit for every dollar of revenue than Apple. Doesn't take too many quarters doing that to see a stock price jump up quite a bit. And it only takes about 27% increase in MSFT for them to eclipse AAPL; they added 30% to their stock price in the last 6 months alone.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Heck, if anything those numbers show that LinkedIn is massively UNDERvalued! I mean, Uber is worth $60 billion and they are only losing $2.5 billion a year. That means LinkedIn, who's losing less than 1/5th the amount of Uber should be worth $900 billion all on its own!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?
"they still hold a 90% desktop market share" I find that hard to believe. I work for a Fortune 50 company and the vast majority of people I come in contact with around the company use Macs. When I'm in large group meetings and look around I see a sea of Mac Books. And this isn't a technology company. We are a manufacturing company. Of course this is just one anecdote from one company, but I see the same thing at coffee shops, conferences, people's homes, etc. They either use mac book laptops, tablets (not the surface), or phones (not Microsoft phones). Other than Outlook and Powerpoint I see few MS products being used. I've actually been surprised that they've been able to stay in business and not they are talking about MS reaching 1 trillion? I'm honestly flabbergasted.
SQL Server now runs on Linux (it can even run in Docker containers!) and this is going to make a serious dent in Oracle's market share, as many organizations have been waiting to escape the Oracle life-sucking contracts for a long time.
Wow, going from Oracle to MS SQL?
Thus demonstrating that people who make bad decisions make bad decisions, I guess.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."