adabyron

I think a tricky thing is names like WMT, COST, TJX already have high p/e ratios.

You could usually try utilities or energy but those are also high due to AI buildout & Iran.

I think gold could make a come back since it's beating down a bit this year. Treasuries or just a reasonable hedge with puts against your holdings may be the best bet.

Of course none of this is financial advice & is just open discussion looking for thoughts.

They have original thoughts! It's just that those employees get squashed by other divisions or having to meet short term quarterly profits it seems.

There's also the whole giant trillion dollar company doesn't want to invest and let small ideas grow. They only focus on things that move the needle, which isn't much at the size.

Had Microsoft executed and invested, they could have made a come back imo in both search, mobile & hardware. Unfortunately major lack of leadership or they just don't want those areas.

I've found less friction in my experience. I prefer pair programming remotely over in person.

Pair Programming in person - one computer & one person looking over another's shoulder usually.

Pair Programming remotely - two computers & you can easily swap control of either's device or change who's sharing their screen.

The only thing working in an office wins on imo is building very close relationships with co-workers. I think physical presence is a human thing that cannot be beat. You can still build great relationships remotely but they're not the same. From the point of view of a company, remote relationships might be good enough or even better as they can prevent people becoming "to close" and ending up on the news at a concert together.

If you can get people to sit down and think through topics, many of the right and left people are often very aligned.

Unfortunately to many people just take headlines and memes from terrible sources as to how they should think without putting any thought into it. Both sides are also vilified against each other.

I would expect this to become one of those things in the near future.

A lot of the loopholes are really simple. You don't need a sophisticated tax scheme, just enough money to do the simple ones.

You need to apply it to staff as well and also the judicial branch and all of their staff. Then to all of their family as well.

The way I understand insider trading is usually prosecuted is you find out who made the bet & then you have to track down their communications to see if they got tipped off.

Google famously just did this with their Captcha service. Had lots of people signing up for a more complicated version on Google Cloud that they didn't need to do.

Strong agree!

They had great devices before iOS/Android and then again after. That Lumia phone was awesome. They had one of the best cameras. Their live tiles they had on the phone & desktop OS were really good. Even Windows 8 had a cool CRM app in its infancy that tried to link all your social media & email accounts together.

They killed all of that even with multiple chances to win people over. It seemed they wanted to win the new markets in less than a year.

For as much flack as Google gets for short lived awesome products, Microsoft is right up there. Which is why when they've announced new things like Blazor, MAUI, etc., no one expects them to live long enough to trust their apps on.

I also strongly question their enterprise MOAT when most kids are growing up on Apple & Google devices the past decade. Microsoft seems to lack long term strategy.

Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till.

There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.

Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?

Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.

Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.

Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.

I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.

In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with.

For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.

I can't remember the names. Best bet if you don't want to listen is to just get summaries or transcriptions of the episodes you can an LMM questions on.

The info on his podcasts isn't telling you who to short. It's more who has gone under & general knowledge.

Highly recommend listening to past episodes on The Real Eisman Playbook podcast for more info on this topic & banking in general.

https://podcasts.apple.com/bz/podcast/the-real-eisman-playbo...

He's one of the "Big Short" guys but more importantly he has great guests on. Everyone is trying to teach & inform, not sell.

He's been calling this risk out for over a year, especially once the White House started trying to allow retirement accounts access to private credit. For a lot of people that was the big alert, even before Jamie Dimon said he saw "cockroaches".

Highly recommend using JetBrains Rider instead if you want the best IDE experience. It's not a Microsoft product & is used by a large percentage of .NET devs.

Part of me agrees with this & says we have been doing IFTTT thing for 20 years.

Other part of me is arguing that old annoying Dropbox/Box Hacker News scenario where all us tech people aren't impressed but this makes it easier for non-tech people.

Tiny tinfoil security part of me is cowering in fear.

Changing my title to "Astronaut" right now... I'll be using that line as well anytime someone asks me to do something.

Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.

I recommend John Boehner's book. He complimented Obama often, stated he & his team were far more ready than McCain to work with Bush on the economy. They were smoking buddies.

Maybe some Microsoft Devs can publish a book about all the secret regedit hacks they use to make it function for themselves. I think Dave Plummer or another Msft vet mentioned you can remove hibernate & get 25GB back on your hard drive.

Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.

Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.

I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.

They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.

Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.

I see no reason why both parties should not try.

Nikki Haley did very well in the primary against a more well known Ron DeSantis & Chris Christie. We have had multiple governors.

The only 2 that have run are not a good example.

A lot of people had strong opinions on Hillary that had nothing to do with her politics or leadership. A lot didn't want another 4-8 years of Clinton/Bush after 28 years depending on how you count Bush Sr. You could even add another 4 to that for Hillary's 4 yrs of influence as Secretary of State.

Harris wasn't popular in the primaries, many thought she wasn't deserving of the VP & she was part of an unpopular White House that was given a few ticking time bombs that they didn't properly diffuse. They also failed miserably to communicate with the public.

I'm not sure if the next few generations will have the same opportunities as the last few that enjoyed America's dominate place in the world, who also took out incredible amounts of debt that the upcoming generations will have to pay back somehow.

The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.

Hopefully technology continues to be a thing that rises all boats & that more people can get said boat.

I fear the current tax laws, political contributions & financial regulations favor those with more wealth so much that when you factor in compounding, their wealth will continue to grow at extreme levels compared to those with less wealth. Retail needs to start pulling their money out of stocks until large companies reduce executive pay to reasonable levels. Otherwise we just blindly keep supporting this current chaos. I believe we also need to start taxing margin loans, instead of going down a wealth tax road.

But how hard is it for your companies to migrate?

Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.

When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?

I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.

Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.

* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.

Excel has amazing super powers.

PowerPoint is underrated.

For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.

In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.

The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.

It would help if Americans educated themselves on the basics of taxes. They would realize quickly how W-2 income employees pay a very high tax rate when you factor in FICA vs high wealth individuals who pay little to no FICA or income taxes. Add in the benefit of compound interest, cheap margin loans, and you have an incredibly unfair system. It's also why many wealthy individuals argue for a "smaller" government & less taxes. They travel private, go to private schools & prefer to avoid anything "public".

All this is with just the very basics, not counting step up basis, trusts or anything slightly complicated.

The average American can file for free, or at least it was possible in the past.

They could also learn to file their taxes, as well as simple tax planning, in a very short video.