That said, anyone can own Microsoft stock. With respect to current employees - the common wisdom has always been not to own too much stock in your employer, with the rationale that if things aren't going well and the stock is tanking, you're likely to get laid off and then you're even worse off. But these days I'm thinking that the opposite is true, at least in bigtech: The more likely scenario is that you get laid off regardless and the stock goes up in response.
All this stock upside might put some people's compensation to their true market value, but even that is based on tenure and historical stock vests.
Will it happen again a generation later? Depends on how many candidates go to Amazon instead, I guess.
These employees are going to complain, but unless they have their FU money already, they are 100% going to RTO. What else can they do within reason?
i wouldn't mind this
Not anymore.
While there have been layoffs, companies are generally still hiring and often employees can overlap severance with a new role.
Please.
There was a great article I found on HN recently about how the recent layoffs in big tech are actually the result of overhiring for years in a talent arms race.
Like, is AI now doing the former work of 25,000 people at Microsoft? Probably not.
Other than that, I think you don't need too much dependence on them, depending on how you look at them controlling it. It being OSS personally gives it more stability since it can always be forked if they pull some nonsense.
Sure, they are both fruits, that's where it ends.
Out of genuine curiosity (not *nix/OSS fanboying) - how so? macOS has been a BSD for a quarter of a century and modern Windows was designed by a guy who cut his teeth at DEC on VMS. Virtually all modern computer OSes have roots in time-sharing systems.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marek-gibney_microsofts-story...
Life started with self-replicating molecules. And ramped up all the way to structures like the human body which consists not just of quintillions of molecules but of billions of quintillions of molecules.
Just for reference, 18 quintillion grains of rice is roughly 500 times the global production of rice in 2022.
It's a fun what if, I guess.
Related: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dz2vRqxf0HI&pp=0gcJCccJAYcqIYz...
Growing at 60% per year for ten years is a factor of slightly over 100.
You seem to assume that the global wealth is static. If that is the case, how were those $500T created in the first place?
The numbers you're talking about aren't feasible. MSFT grew that fast into the Desktop era because it was starting from a much smaller number. You can grow from $400m to $40b, but you growing from $40b to $4T is a much different story (and remarkable that they were able to do that!). Growing from $4T to $100T is not only unprecedented but unimaginable.
So you might be making a calculation instead of a prediction, but it's a worthless calculation. You may as well extrapolate the 10x weight gain of an infant to an adult and calculate that their weight at middle-age will be 1000 pounds.
To be clear, I do not _like_ the vision on a lot of fronts, especially around privacy, but there are a few points that are much less risk averse. The amount of money dumped into the metaverse shows they are willing to try some outlandish things to see if they stick. I don't see that attitude from any of the other big ones outside of more ways to bolt AI onto everything they ever wrote or feigning interest in something new like Apple Vision.
In a field of very mid players, he actually ends up standing out.
In the 80s, when Microsoft went public, the US GDP was under 5 Trillion.
The only reason why they do exist is because the people with the money are the people with the power.
I see MS as a US gov approved monopoly. I didn't check their SEC filings, but I suspect that US gov is a number one buyer, while various EU countries combined make number two. That's a coercion to me, not software business.
Terms like
- You won, Windows is very popular, we are going to buy it and open source it, no more ads, no more opt-out telemetry
- Same with Office
- Same with Github
- Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular
- XBox and Kinect and all the hardware stuff can stay private since it's not a monopoly and not de-facto public infrastructure
I wish I could live to see government that is both good and powerful, you know
I think I could see that happening to several companies, not just MS as well - once something gets so huge that it would be detrimental to the survival of a nation if it failed, it gets nationalized.
> - Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular
That I'm not sure about though. Azure is unpopular with SaaS, but it's increasingly popular with non-tech enterprises, as well as basically anyone that remotely competes with Amazon. Good chance that if a company's core product isn't SaaS, they are on Azure.
Making large companies state-owned wouldn't preclude them from being monopolies, it just changes who's in charge of monopoly abuse. With state-owned monopolies you end up with something more like USSR.
No, OP is right: this much concentrated power just shouldn't be allowed, period.
State owned monopolies really only make sense for natural monopolies (e.g. transport and communications infrastructure), and I wouldn't really count desktop operating systems as that. Windows is a monopoly due to extremely strong network effects.
Cash on hand is leverage in tech employment just like anywhere, but amolified during periods of structural demand shift. If one can get a year or three of easy runway, one can reskill/upskill into stuff with demand shifting into it. Right now I'm screwing around with Jetson boards and stuff like that: LLMs may cone and go but robots are here to stay.
And even the BATNA of "I'll go do OSS full time for a year" is leverage with your current employer. People with options are less likely to be fucked with in the first place.
Eh - it's a dangerous time to be a software engineer anywhere.
Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people
