<story><title>Microsoft surges 8% after Morgan Stanley says it will reach $1T market cap</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/26/microsoft-surges-8-after-morgan-stanley-says-it-will-reach-1-trillion-market-cap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endorphone</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Windows is under enormous threat, and much of our computing now takes place on alternate devices. The example of O365 is the perfect example, that platform being equally usable across many platforms (because it had to to have any market influence).&lt;p&gt;And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that doesn&amp;#x27;t support the theory of Microsoft dominance. It is yesteryear trying to desperately hang on to have relevance. That is not an example of why Microsoft is a 1T company, but is an example of why the future doesn&amp;#x27;t look so hot.</text></item><item><author>tammer</author><text>My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The odds of us &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt; leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really hit a powerful long-term business model.&lt;p&gt;The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We&amp;#x27;re buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can&amp;#x27;t beat the cost savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we&amp;#x27;d have to pay through the nose.&lt;p&gt;Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that disruption will take quite a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bri3d</author><text>Is there real competition in the front-office &amp;#x2F; back-office &amp;quot;alternate devices&amp;quot; space? There are certainly niche players but at least at the $bigcos I&amp;#x27;ve worked at, most &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; tasks aren&amp;#x27;t easily accomplished on a tablet, phone, or Chromebook. Web spreadsheets tend to be feature-incomplete, presentation and document creation is a mess, and that&amp;#x27;s not even starting in on the hundreds of proprietary front-office tools for appointment scheduling and client management and back-office tools for analytics and finance, which are strongly Windows-based. I&amp;#x27;ve only seen a few people use tablets day-to-day and they&amp;#x27;re all mid-to-upper level execs whose jobs are far more delegation-and-communication oriented and who have the liberty of sending someone an email when they need &amp;quot;the numbers&amp;quot; pulled or a slide presentation whipped together.&lt;p&gt;Even the BigCos I&amp;#x27;ve worked at who use GSuite have had an additional subscription to Office365 for employees who need Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. I&amp;#x27;ve seen very few larger companies who can subsist on Google Sheets alone.&lt;p&gt;This could be something that changes in the next 5-10 years, certainly, but it&amp;#x27;s been a prophecy that&amp;#x27;s underdelivered for years. Kind of feels like the &amp;quot;year of Linux on the desktop&amp;quot; all over again.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft surges 8% after Morgan Stanley says it will reach $1T market cap</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/26/microsoft-surges-8-after-morgan-stanley-says-it-will-reach-1-trillion-market-cap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endorphone</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Windows is under enormous threat, and much of our computing now takes place on alternate devices. The example of O365 is the perfect example, that platform being equally usable across many platforms (because it had to to have any market influence).&lt;p&gt;And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that doesn&amp;#x27;t support the theory of Microsoft dominance. It is yesteryear trying to desperately hang on to have relevance. That is not an example of why Microsoft is a 1T company, but is an example of why the future doesn&amp;#x27;t look so hot.</text></item><item><author>tammer</author><text>My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The odds of us &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt; leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really hit a powerful long-term business model.&lt;p&gt;The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We&amp;#x27;re buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can&amp;#x27;t beat the cost savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we&amp;#x27;d have to pay through the nose.&lt;p&gt;Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that disruption will take quite a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>They discount it to sweeten the deal for your company&amp;#x27;s accounting department, who are almost always 100% suits who want what&amp;#x27;s familiar and have enough influence over the accounts to be able to get their way.&lt;p&gt;But the reality is that for a 100% single-vendor, integrated system that works well with everything that&amp;#x27;s already installed in an SMB or larger, there are no competitors for O365.&lt;p&gt;Back when I was doing SMB consulting gigs, I tried to steer a few folks away from it, because I think it&amp;#x27;s a bad long-term move to rely on too many services from a single vendor, and especially when those are all off-premises services that depend on a lot of working technology between you and the vendor. But, it became clear before long that I was giving bad advice. The clients that ignored me and went with O365 were happier, and when something went wrong, they just shrugged and said, &amp;quot;oh well, Microsoft will fix it soon.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Whereas if something went wrong with any other system, it was my fault because I recommended it, even if I couldn&amp;#x27;t do anything about whatever particular piece was broken.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, point is, every customer that signs up for O365 at any price is going to be a Microsoft customer for a very long time, and I don&amp;#x27;t see anybody on the horizon that is going to be changing anyone&amp;#x27;s mind about it.</text></comment>