Technology

I think she's saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She's not saying they made the wrong decision, she's saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

If ifs and butts were candy and nuts we'd all have a merry Christmas.

Everything AI boom is likely a lie, and Nvidia bribing Trump to sell H200s to China, at 25% export tariff, is proof of incapacity or unwillingness of US industry to deploy them.

I'd love for you to be right (I'd like to see nvidia compete as an underdog since they are fairly anticompetitive in their dominant position) but think this reasoning is flawed.

Wanting to sell to China just means that demand isn't exceeding supply, or maybe even that they have access to more supply that they'd use if they could sell to China, which is a massive market. Or even if they don't have any excess supply, higher demand means they can set higher prices and still expect to sell all inventory.

Like the US car companies wanting to sell cars in China doesn't imply that they are unable to sell cars in the US, it just means they want to sell cars to China and the US.

I agree with the rest of your comment and think it was well said, sorry about this nitpick.

I initially thought he was great. Their cloud business was booming, it looked like they were converging their tools, windows 10 had its flaws but was pretty good. But now the tools are an enormous mess because they have changed their minds 5 times over, Windows 11 is complete dogshit and all the tools that are actually handy are paywalled behind expensive licences. Copilot is being forcefed to unwilling users and every single one of their tools is becoming worse.

So yea, I think he's a business illiterate because there is no strategy behind this mess.

Ehhh...that's their market capitalization, not their cash on hand.

The market capitalization is just what the company is worth, based on what investors are currently willing to pay for ownership of shares in the company.

EDIT: Here's Microsoft's cash on hand:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/cash-on-hand

Looks like about $100 billion.

Or double down on AI. Then double down even harder.

• Make the use of Copilot mandatory; simultaneously heavily monetize it to instantly turn the AI division into a profit center.
• To that end release the successor to Windows 11, a cloud-only offering that replaces the taskbar with a Copilot instance which launches programs for the user. Downplay any accusations that the new Windows Live 365 With Copilot is just a rental Windows 11 with the taskbar hastily hacked out.
• Don't forget that Windows Live 365 With Copilot does not include a subscription for Copilot, which must be booked separately.
• Get all of your customers to switch by immediately dropping support for all previous Windows versions, "migrating" their support windows over to Windows Live 365 With Copilot. Corporate customers, which have gone all-in on Azure, will need years to migrate off the Windows ecosystem, which means excellent short-term revenue.
• Make sure that Windows Live 365 With Copilot can only save to OneDrive to make it maximally hard for those customers to get their data out.
• Hope that the current world order disintegrates before the massive exodus of customers ruins the company.
• Whether or not it does, turn off your business phone and spend the next five years doing massive amounts of cocaine on a private island in the South Pacific.

This would be great, but unfortunately would not make number go up. That is all they care about now.

Their core users are corporations, not personal households.

I hope so, too. However when AI dies nothing will go back to normal. I have been waiting for things to go back to normal since the GPU shortage from the bitcoin shambles. Christ, I'm still using a 980ti and have given up buying new games (which, ironically, probably saved me enough money to buy a top line GPU)

They will find another way to manufacture some shortage or another to bump up the prices and gouge gouge gouge.

Something that I'm super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn't last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren't keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn't enough to get anything that they'd consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).

As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my "normie" friends, because they're one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I'm trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.

(A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn't expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

AI357 as in I'd rather eat a .357? Impeccable marketing

Naw, the valuation is still $3.22 trillion. The bigger tell will be the AI only companies start feeling the squeeze.

The problem is only a few humans with OCD that manifests as financial hoarding. They have more money than they or their descendants could ever spend, and yet they are driven to accumulate more, despite the obvious deleterious effects on society and the world.

If they were hoarding cats, or old newspapers, or rusty cars, etc., we'd step in, get them mental health help, and clean up the mess.

But since it's money, we praise them for their success, and make it easier for them to indulge their mental illness even more. Sometimes we even GIVE them more money for free, just because it makes them so happy.

It's time to stop indulging these lunatics. Take their businesses and fortunes away, we paid for most of it anyway, and put these maniacs in mental health facilities where they belong, at least until they have internalized a healthier attitude toward wealth, and their fellow citizens, and want to use their gifts to improve America, and not exploit it.

That's because it's MBA speech for "AI has cost us this shitload of money."