Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/06/microsoft_nadella_tough_years_ahead/

by churchill • 4 years ago

13 3 4 years ago

meltyness2• 4 years ago

I could only listen to about half of this. This is not what tech leadership sounds like, this is what a financier sounds like. Their strategy is to continue to try and compete in commodity-services with AWS.

...but if that's so, and you want to do things "efficiently", why rathole capital into hololens? Are x86-jammed unprovisioned data centers really efficient?

Microsoft has enough credit to suddenly genesis anything imaginable or useful, it's ridiculous to hear their CEO yammer on about margins.

Presumably this is why capital has flowed to Apple, they're at least willing to signal that there's demand for new products.

Even better, he doesn't believe in formal ed.

At least it's not "Microsoft announces Bing+" Bottom line statements like this from 25% of the economy are obviously self-fulfilling prophecy, and I'm not a fan.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-satya-nade...

prng2021• 4 years ago

You only want to listen to half of what the CEO of the 2nd biggest tech company has to say about the tech industry?

"you want to do things "efficiently", why rathole capital into hololens?"

I'm not sure if you've heard, but there were/are/will be billions of dollars being poured into AR and VR technologies by many companies, Apple included.

"Are x86-jammed unprovisioned data centers really efficient?"

Are your talking about their cloud computing services? Considering AWS is expected to bring in close to $100B in revenue this year, I'd say "x86-jammed datacenters" are a worthwhile business segment to prioritize.

"Presumably this is why capital has flowed to Apple"

AAPL stock has dropped 25% in the past 12 months and MSFT dropped 28%. So that particular data point doesn't show any significant outflow of investment from Microsoft and to Apple.

"it's ridiculous to hear their CEO yammer on about margins"

He runs one of the biggest publicly traded companies in the world. You're surprised he's talking about a metric investors care about?

meltyness2• 4 years ago

AR

First, I've been following Oculus since it was covered in black masking tape and you could only play Doom 3, by aiming with your face. OTOH my experience with HoloLens is that it is basically non-functional. And other Microsoft apps are years behind tool chains developed at "tiny ants" like Valve (ie, Maquette) One of these things is clearly more capital efficient than the other -- talking down markets to seek M&A opportunities, aside.

Data centers

It's not about the tech with them, it's about being a shell company of shell companies. Disastrously inefficient. What happens when someone builds Helium for personal cloud services?

There's more examples though of them sloppily oozing into ad tech, ed tech, those are just two examples of Microsoft's half-problematic approach to segment expansion.

Valuation

I was referring primarily to the Market cap -- Apple is priced 17.9% larger.

Margins

It's a flywheel, but they never seem to be planning for the future, just to exist as a spike pit for companies that build good products to fall into. And even as an investment they're priced as growth, and their dividend yield is atrocious. He needs to take notes from (probably dishonest) Cook and claim it's going into self-driving cars, AR headsets, and green biotech research, and markets will price it in right away.

I get that money rules the world, and these companies are all just mountain climbing walls of debt, cash flows, and consumer-facing markets as gravity, but some of the loose rocks I'm calling forth here should really be the concern, not an outlook on how global banks, investors, and hedge funds are going to be shuffling cash around in the next 2 years. This type of talk is a shellgame, totally out of line for a CEO, it's not 5 years forward -- it's not even 5 years behind where Microsoft typically lingers, it's just very disagreeable to me.

Surely, this company has runway that their CEO can focus on building unique, immaculate, must-have products rather than going on TV and whining that debt is too expensive, claiming you don't need schooling to use the product, and predicting everyone in all other sectors is going to use whatever Microsoft puts out in perpetuity.

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

Related Stories