[HN Gopher] Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
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Microsoft overtakes Apple as most valuable company
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-01-11 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| bmitc wrote:
| Re-overtakes. It's happened several times.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Why? I've never heard Microsoft doing anything relevant in the
| last 15 years or so. What's the news?
|
| Perhaps it's just the same may be said about Apple now. At least
| they have A4 though, whereas Microsoft does not seem to be
| jumping x86 ship just yet, does it?
| bch wrote:
| > [...]thanks to the early lead the company has taken in
| generative artificial intelligence through an investment in
| ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
| kcb wrote:
| They put themselves in the best position to capitalize on AI
| especially in the enterprise but also by integrating Copilot
| into Windows. With so many companies already trusting their
| confidential data to MS, it's easy to justifying using
| their/OpenAI tech through Azure.
|
| CPU architectures are irrelevant to Microsoft at this point.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Microsoft is also starting to develop their own chips and are
| expanding more into ARM. They can't just "abandon" x86/64
| like people think they can, it's not realistic. If they ever
| do it will be almost 20 years from now unless ARM just gets
| -that- far ahead that they have no choice.
| zwieback wrote:
| Cloud and AI investments are paying off.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Stock price comes from public expectations. This just
| confirms that the public expects openai to pay off
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Their revenue sources are more diverse than you think. Products
| that are either directlyfrom their portfolio, or from a company
| they have a large stake in
|
| - Windows
|
| - Office 365, which includes Teams, a product that has boomed
| in usage since 2020
|
| - Xbox + Activision Blizzard
|
| - Azure Cloud, the 2nd largest cloud computing platform
|
| - Github, by far the largest version control platform for
| developers
|
| - Linkedin, quickly becoming one of the largest platforms for
| hiring
|
| - Bing search + their ad network
|
| - OpenAI/ChatGPT
|
| - Edge browser
|
| - Surface line of laptops and tablets
| skc wrote:
| SQL Server is a massive business as well.
| nikanj wrote:
| Because they picked a CEO with a background in the very
| products the company is making. Often companies this size pick
| a professional bean-counter to man the helm, with predictable
| results
| ozim wrote:
| Relevant for who? Influencers that have to have MacBook because
| otherwise they cannot show off their "wealth".
|
| MS was doing relevant stuff for corporations like banks,
| insurance companies, public services. That is where real money
| is Apple doesn't have any of it.
| tempaway82751 wrote:
| Microsoft is the most diversified of the major players. OS,
| Office, Enterprise, Cloud, Gaming, Devices, AI
| otalp wrote:
| I would argue Amazon is more diversified but bogged down by a
| low margin retail business
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Microsoft relies on independent hardware vendors selling
| Windows PCs, so they can't just go and build their own CPU like
| Apple can. They partnered with Qualcomm, but Qualcomm
| underdelivered.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I guess they finally got enough Win11 upgrades?
| seydor wrote:
| This rally doesnt make a lot of sense
| devinprater wrote:
| Apple just has to make a Siri key on their MacBooks. They'll then
| be so number one they might go passed 1 into 0, and then -1, ETC.
| /s
| yousifa wrote:
| that already exists, its the microphone button
| scottyah wrote:
| The main things I see lately are: Apple is creating VR headsets
| and new chip technology, Microsoft is buying up AI companies and
| injecting ads/spyware into their operating systems. Also
| Microsoft is getting big into cloud.
|
| Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Ok, so one of those technologies potentially saves people time
| and levels the playing field by enabling the use of computers
| with less special training to achieve equivalent results.
|
| The other one aims to strap screens to other people's faces to
| keep them even longer in a perpetually-online computer bubble
| of their own choosing, because that's been going great for
| society so far.
| al_borland wrote:
| Those are some upsides of AI, there are also many potential
| downsides that could be very harmful to society, more so than
| some AR goggles. Time will tell how it all plays out.
|
| Apple is also invested in AI, they just refuse to use the AI
| buzzword, and use ML instead, which is probably the more
| accurate term.
| tivert wrote:
| > Ok, so one of those technologies potentially saves people
| time and levels the playing field by enabling the use of
| computers with less special training to achieve equivalent
| results.
|
| Did you forget allowing the sum total of human knowledge to
| be swamped by dogshit, because it allows for the creation of
| dogshit at scale more cheaply than ever before?
| croes wrote:
| >potentially saves people time
|
| And potentially kills people's jobs, potentially helps
| spammers and phisher to start larger and better campaigns,
| potentially increases the amount of fake news, disinformation
| or just bullshit.
| bmitc wrote:
| Microsoft is _much_ more diversified than that. They have
| entire consulting services and a world class research arm and
| many other things that Apple has no analog of.
| bch wrote:
| > world class research arm
|
| Honest question: does Wall Street care? In my experience,
| this is the kind of thing that's (rightly or wrongly)
| considered a "cost center", not a "profit center".
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I think you're right, investors don't really value the
| research arm until something profitable comes out of it and
| then they only value that thing that came out of it and not
| research arm itself.
|
| In some sense, that is the right move. For example, Intel
| was a market leader for decades while their research arm
| was very stagnant for many years too. Other times, it is
| short sighted not to price in what might be to come because
| you miss buying shares on the cheap before a huge
| technology/product leap.
| dataangel wrote:
| Ignorant question: Does much actually make it out of MS
| Research? I've seen lots of interesting retrospectives on
| stuff that either failed or just has never come out of the
| lab (Singularity/Midori, accessibility demos showing phones
| reading restaurant menus to the blind, their tablet pre-ipad,
| etc.) but I don't think I know of anything they made that
| really grew up off the top of my head.
|
| I didn't want to say this without doing a little bit of
| homework so I checked their Wikipedia page
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research) which
| doesn't list any accomplishments, just claims they have a lot
| of patents, and their main site has a publication index
| (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/?) but
| publication is not a good metric for ever seeing use.
| speps wrote:
| Back in 2014 for the release of Kinect Sports Rivals, the
| tech to scan people and extract their body details into the
| right face shapes to match them with a virtual avatar. That
| came from MS Research Cambridge as far as I know.
|
| Here is a video of it demo'd: https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _Does much actually make it out of MS Research?_
|
| Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie
| Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but
| as far as actual research output that has been
| commercialized, there is not much to show off.
| scns wrote:
| Is Simon Peyton Jones still at Microsoft? He is is at Epic
| Games now IIRC. Lennart Poettering is there though last i
| heard.
| dataangel wrote:
| Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply the people there never
| produce anything that gets widely used in their whole
| careers, I'm specifically asking if it ever happens
| _while_ they are at MS Research.
| bmitc wrote:
| There are several examples. F# came from Microsoft Research
| and has also fed into C#. Also, Haskell.
|
| Note that it does research and not R&D. You aren't going to
| get products from research but rather technology
| advancements that then get incorporated. That happens a
| lot, and they obviously publish a lot.
| thefz wrote:
| Read or watch something about how flight simulator was
| built, as an example
| paxys wrote:
| Microsoft is one of the most diversified companies in
| existence. Pretty much every business, every government and
| most consumers around the world are directly or indirectly
| paying them money for _something_ , whether software, devices,
| consulting, cloud, data. On the other hand Apple's success for
| the last 15 years has relied on a single device. Now that the
| device is running into some issues (dropping sales in China,
| general stall in innovation, regulatory hurdles) their stock
| price is reacting accordingly.
|
| Of course investors aren't rewarding them for an upcoming VR
| headset which is yet to be proven. Why would they?
| GoToRO wrote:
| also people don't realize how local Apple is. In a lot of
| countries you can't even access their services which
| decreases the value of their devices.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| But oddly enough one of those countries isn't China. Its
| weird how Google and Facebook can't do much their while
| everything from Apple works as well as anywhere else.
| shortcrct wrote:
| Because Apple is willing to play China's game. Google and
| Facebook's business models (ads) fundamentally don't work
| with China's government. They sell different products
| than Apple.
| twism wrote:
| i was just thinking i haven't paid MS anything since i got my
| hands on "VXKC4-2B3YF-W9MFK-QB3DB-9Y7MB"
|
| ... then i just got an email receipt from my xbox gold
| subscription. curses!
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _On the other hand Apple 's success for the last 15 years
| has relied on a single device._
|
| That "single device company" makes just half of its revenue
| from iPhones. Recurring services revenue accounted for almost
| 25%.
| paxys wrote:
| How much of that other half would still be around if the
| iPhone was no longer a thing? Apple Care? App store
| purchases? IAP/microtransactions? Apple Pay? iCloud
| storage? Chargers? Airpods?
|
| They can structure their financial reports however they
| like, but it doesn't change the fact that their entire
| ecosystem is directly or indirectly tied to that one
| device.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > Interesting to see what Wall Street rewards.
|
| It seems to be rewarding Apple? They also had a similar market
| cap two years ago. Microsoft has seen growth in revenue and net
| income, Apple has not. Going back to pre-covid times the
| picture is similar: better financial results for Microsoft but
| still head-to-head with Apple in market cap.
| thefz wrote:
| Microsoft has been innovating way more than Apple, which is
| always going for the low hanging fruit of taking tested and
| consolidated tech from others and rebranding it as its own.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| If you think that a company's market capitalization isn't high
| enough, you can always buy its stock. Conversely, if you think
| it's too high, you can always short it. Not financial advice.
| riley333 wrote:
| Apple just needs to do SOMETHING exciting with AI. Vision Pro
| looks great, but it's only a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
| I'm not sure if they're just too big to move at the speed they
| need to move or if it's something more damning about their
| internal culture but they need to do something in this space
| faster than I think most people realize.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Or maybe they just need to survive long enough to see what is
| actually valuable in AI and not going to damn their company.
| al_borland wrote:
| Apple is rarely first to release new tech. They watch and
| develop quietly in the lab, then release an implementation that
| everyone else seems to copy.
|
| So far their approach has been different, but their last
| keynote mentioned ML countless times. We can only assume they
| have more in the pipeline, and it will run locally on-device,
| which seems preferable to all the data collection being done
| with most companies working on AI.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Funny how we're at the eve of Vision Pro coming to consumers,
| twelve years after the Oculus Rift.
|
| blah blah those who don't study history something whatever
| riley333 wrote:
| That's true, and Apple has the capital to do pretty much
| whatever they want. I just think as we've seen with
| Google/Gemini it doesn't seem that easy to beat what OpenAI
| has going even with a lot of money to throw behind it. And I
| don't think Tim Cook is that much of a visionary but that's
| just my personal opinion.
|
| I hope Apple does succeed though because I love their
| hardware and their silicon is great for AI applications.
| vrc wrote:
| I'm just waiting for Siri to reliably set timers when I'm
| cooking. Between my watch and my phone, it's a damn nightmare
| to actually do the most basic thing with what should be a
| ubiquitous AI platform. They've had ages to make it better and
| some great minds in their employ, and yet they've really not
| done much. That said, if and when they do, they have immediate
| distribution and proof points to sell oodles more of their AI-
| enabled products and wearables...
| mft_ wrote:
| Funny you raise that, as this is one of the very few tasks
| that Siri _does_ do reliably for me :)
|
| (Along with just-about-good-enough speech-to-text, if I speak
| clearly, and checking on the weather outside.)
|
| --
|
| But yes, totally agree with your underlying point about the
| huge opportunity that Apple is leaving on the table with
| their lackluster approach to Siri.
| paxys wrote:
| Microsoft's recent stock gains are obviously due to AI hype and
| the expected returns from it, but does the company actually have
| obvious lines of revenue from AI to that degree? Looking at the
| numbers investors are expecting them to make more from LLMs than
| they do from products like Windows and Office.
|
| I don't want to use the "bubble" word, but...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People expect LLM's to be folded into Office, and MS to command
| a premium for the real or perceived productivity boost.
| foobarian wrote:
| What about Azure revenues providing access to GPU resources?
| paxys wrote:
| That's all going to NVIDIA.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Microsoft's biggest lines of business support knowledge work
| (Windows, email, Office, MS365, etc) and AI is looking it will
| provide a nice productivity bump to knowledge workers.
|
| Even just building AI into existing products could help justify
| price increases, offset on the customer side by higher
| productivity.
|
| In plain English: AI means companies will need fewer knowledge
| workers per unit revenue and MS will have a strong claim on
| some of those additional profits if they are supplying the AI
| (even if they are reselling OpenAI).
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Bill Gates, at time of IPO owned 49% of Microsoft.
|
| If he hadn't sold his stock, he'd be worth ~$1.5 _Trillion_
|
| To put that into context, he'd be worth 6x Elon Musk (who's the
| current riches person-in-the-world)
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire....
| paxys wrote:
| But there would be a shit ton more polio in the world, so I'll
| accept that tradeoff.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Larry Ellison still today owns 42% of Oracle.
|
| What he does instead is take out loans against his stock.
|
| Bill could have done the same and still fund all his
| philanthropy.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/lawrence-
| j-e....
| huytersd wrote:
| Man I love Bill Gates so much. I know low effort posts are
| frowned here but I had to say it.
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