[HN Gopher] Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008
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       Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008
        
       Author : dvfjsdhgfv
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2026-03-28 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | This is a leading indicator for what is to come after the IPOs of
       | SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic this year.
       | 
       | and it is not good.
        
         | throwaway132448 wrote:
         | With any luck they've missed their exit dumping window.
        
         | x0x0 wrote:
         | spacex is particular is desperately searching for a bagholder.
         | Leveraging the obvious synergies between rockets (a mediocre
         | business), xai (a horrid business), and social media that lost
         | more than half it's already modest revenues...
        
           | Ekaros wrote:
           | SpaceX has reasonable business in it. Not a hypergrowth one,
           | but one which should be solid in long term.
           | 
           | To get that to work they just would need to discard Musk and
           | most things with him. Stop trying to make starship a thing,
           | dump everything attached to it. Make a long term plan to
           | improve the core lift capacity with actually achievable
           | improvements.
        
             | x0x0 wrote:
             | > To get that to work they just would need to discard Musk
             | and most things with him
             | 
             | I'll have a pet unicorn shitting rainbows before Musk
             | leaves one of his toys _or_ we see in-orbit leading-edge
             | (or anything close to it) processor production. SpaceX is a
             | decent albeit capital intensive business if it 's valued at
             | $100-200B. At the proposed $1.5T+ valuation for this dog...
             | the bagholder search is on.
        
       | vrganj wrote:
       | If one were to think a major stock market crash was coming up,
       | led by the AI bubble bursting, but reinforced by the major self-
       | own that is the Iran war, how would one best prepare ones
       | investments?
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | https://www.lynalden.com/march-2026-newsletter/ (control-f "The
         | Investment Implications of Chaos")
         | 
         | Not investing advice, I've reallocated away from US domestic
         | equities to international equities (VXUS) as a majority of a
         | portfolio. This hedges against a correction from overweight Mag
         | 7 exposure and US economic growth impairment from current
         | policies (imho).
         | 
         | https://www.axios.com/2026/03/27/stocks-trump-iran-nasdaq
         | 
         | https://totalrealreturns.com/n/VTI,VXUS?start=2025-01-20
         | 
         | https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi...
        
         | iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
         | Dunno, but yesterday was the first time ever I felt confident
         | shorting nearly across the board. Nearly.
        
         | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
         | I think a crash is coming and I do nothing. I rebalance my
         | stock/bond split and keep a large emergency fund as per usual.
        
         | gedy wrote:
         | You can go all cash so not risking leverage via shorts, etc.
         | But a lot of folks think that's dumb. I feel better being in
         | cash right now as the mental stress of big loses in middle age
         | is not worth the missed gains if I'm wrong. To each their own.
        
           | testing22321 wrote:
           | You don't think the US dollar will take a dive along with US
           | stocks?
        
             | JoshuaDavid wrote:
             | What specific thing(s) are you worried that USD will take a
             | dive relative to?
             | 
             | Then once you have an answer to that question, that might
             | point you towards what you want to be long.
        
               | vrganj wrote:
               | How would buying Euros compare in terms of exposure?
        
               | readthenotes1 wrote:
               | The USD could take a dive against: yuan, eu, gbp, rial,
               | gold, silver, platinum, WTI, SPY, etc.
               | 
               | Only a few of them will matter on a day-to-day basis if
               | you're currently in the US with assets valued in USD.
        
               | vrganj wrote:
               | Couldn't you just exchange your EUR for USD as needed?
               | Use it as your reserve currency?
        
               | 9dev wrote:
               | Traders could start buying their oil using Yuan, for
               | example. That's not a theoretical anymore
        
             | suzzer99 wrote:
             | I have a big chunk in FXE (like owning Euros) precisely for
             | this reason.
        
         | chistev wrote:
         | If everyone (most people) think the same, shouldn't you do the
         | opposite?
         | 
         | Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are
         | fearful. Etc.
        
           | vrganj wrote:
           | That might be the case if the market was completely abstract
           | and removed from ground truths.
           | 
           | My feelings about these things don't come from markets.
        
           | Ekaros wrote:
           | I don' think that logic is intended for the top... It is what
           | you should do when you are closing to bottom or are
           | recovering already but most of the market does not yet see
           | it.
           | 
           | Being greedy at the top will take longest time to recover.
           | Catching the falling knife.
        
         | VohuMana wrote:
         | The advice I have heard is if you think there will be a
         | significant drop in the market you liquidate all your holdings
         | while they are still high and then rebuy when the price is low.
         | Granted this is a gamble though, if you're wrong then you just
         | sold all your stock and are no longer participating in the
         | market plus you need to pay capital gains tax
        
           | readthenotes1 wrote:
           | Did you hear this advice from 100 broke people or one lucky
           | schmuck?
        
         | dehrmann wrote:
         | Either you need the cash now and are already in short-term
         | treasuries or you're it it for the long-term and you'll be
         | laughing at this question when the Dow hits 100k.
        
         | gljiva wrote:
         | One should either weather out the storm or if one wants to cash
         | out soon or manage their portfolio more closely they would pick
         | the defensive assets they trust the most and hold until they
         | stop thinking the stock market crash is coming up or stop
         | trusting those assets. If they really think the crash is
         | imminent, maybe investing some excess money into shorting the
         | market while setting trailing stop loss would be a fun activity
         | that might turn profitable
        
         | LeFantome wrote:
         | Other than buying oil futures, probably selling to cash and
         | getting ready to buy when it hits the fan.
        
       | whobre wrote:
       | In stock price, no the earnings
        
       | VirusNewbie wrote:
       | Microsoft is one of the least likely large companies to benefit
       | from an AI boom. They don't have the capacity to support OpenAI
       | and their own foundational models, they aren't providing a
       | compelling story for wrapping OpenAI, windows continues to
       | suck...
       | 
       | OpenAI signed an agreement with GCP , that should say a lot.
        
         | chris_money202 wrote:
         | Once we are able to run language models on any consumer
         | hardware with good T/s Windows will become an absolute
         | powerhouse just like it did in gaming with DirectX. Any
         | application will be able to be AI infused and the API to do so
         | will be consistent and free to the business offering it.
        
         | keeda wrote:
         | OpenAI also signed an agreement with AWS. And Anthropic has
         | signed on with Microsoft as well as GCP.
         | 
         | The underlying dynamic is that no single cloud provider has the
         | capacity required to host all the demand, so the frontier AI
         | labs have no choice but to diversify for their infrastructure
         | needs.
        
       | smuhakg wrote:
       | Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people
       | I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they
       | were only using Copilot.
       | 
       | This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a
       | la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is _worse_
       | at integrating with Office than Claude!
       | 
       | This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet
       | its price point of $20/month. That prevents the AI from
       | meaningfully using tools or being multimodal or anything else
       | their competitors have.
       | 
       | If they added a $200/month tier many of their issues would go
       | away.
        
         | joe_mamba wrote:
         | Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code
         | snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane
         | number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks
         | thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the
         | steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks
         | like "here's your code" lol
         | 
         | How TF can you go to market with such bugs.
        
         | batiudrami wrote:
         | Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do
         | 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m
         | model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire
         | corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.
         | 
         | But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at
         | work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment
         | sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific
         | packages) and it just can't do it. It can read the spreadsheet
         | and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.
        
           | khelavastr wrote:
           | Copilot is actually significantly more reliable at technical
           | tasks with SQL or C# than others, i've found. Do we have
           | different use cases?
           | 
           | Copilot seems to hit the technical level I'm asking about
           | much more reliably. It keeps a more grounded general semantic
           | model.
        
         | maltalex wrote:
         | "Copilot" is not one product, it's around 15 different
         | products, seriously.
         | 
         | I think that people often compare apples to oranges by
         | comparing the "copilot" they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc
         | to Claude Code which is ridiculous.
         | 
         | A better product to compare Claude Code to would be "Github
         | Copilot CLI", but I haven't seen the two seriously compared
         | anywhere.
        
       | pjmlp wrote:
       | Which is why they now are finally listing to customers.
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-28 23:01 UTC)