That's fine, and it's your prerogative, surely. However you must notice there is arbitrary antagonism throughout the thread to which I am responding, not intending to 'inflame' however much that may have been the case and I'm sorry for that.
No, I'm not kidding. The oil in Iraq is 100% under their control. America derives no wealth from Iraqi Oil.
If you want to learn something about it, read up [1]
Of course, some of it is independently controlled by Kurds, and some of it in hostile areas, but it has nothing to do with America.
Will they be rich like Saudis? No, because there isn't quite enough of it, it's in 'hot zones', they still have geopolitical instability making the system totally inefficient.
But again: it's Iraqi oil - not something 'stolen by America'.
Most of the Oil in Iraq is extracted by foreign companies, as I mentioned, a lot of it is extracted by local irregular entities - and the beneficiaries on the other side of the equation, i.e. the 'buyers' of the Oil is
>>> "Why is Saudi a saint"
Who said Saudi Arabia was a saint?
Basically - nobody is saying that.
Saudi Arabia makes headlines daily for their abuses. The US/UK/Canadian (and others) are under a lot of pressure as we speak to limit military sales.
What separates 'China' from 'Saudi Arabia' is the fact that one represents an existential concern, outside their borders, one does not.
China wants to rule that side of the world.
The 'House of Saud' is content to have it's little fiefdom. Of course, the Wahabbis are exporting an ideology, and money flows from Saudi into some not-so-good things, but that's not the House of Saud.
Osama Bin Laden's primary objective was to overthrow the Saudi gov. - the 'destroy America' thing comes much later.
The Saudi Arabian government a) actively works with other powers to track down terrorists b) has a de-facto kind of peace with Israel c) ensures that their Oil flows freely into global markets d) is not trying to overthrow Iran e) is not trying to steal industry and IP f) is not trying to build an army/navy to cause a lot of trouble far beyond their borders. (And Yemen FYI is on their border, it's a spillover problem)
Saudi Arabia is a 'decent state actor' with a lot of internal social problems we don't like.
China has become a hostile economic entity, and is becoming more so a military adversary with concerns about it's borders.
If you're comparing Xianjiang and what's happening at the border then this is not eve remotely 'equal opportunity' criticism - it's classical Chinese moral relativism.
In Xianjiang people are being rounded up for their religion or ethnicity, thrown into concentration camps, made 'non-persons', tortured, killed, if they die on trumped up charges their organs are harvested. It's Nazi-Germany level stuff.
The US is not 'putting children in prison' - the US (was previously) holding people who are trying to enter the country due literally to the prosperity of the nation. They are well treated and are free to leave any time.
Now that the rule has been discarded, migrants bring their children specifically on the dangerous journey because they know if they bring their kids, they don't have to go into detention.
This year there there has been a massive upswing in illegal migration precisely because migrants now know the golden legal loophole: bring a child - and they won't have to be held, they can immediately enter the country. And of course, the irony of the fact these people are desperately trying to get in to the country should not be lost on anyone making morally relative claims comparing that situation to Xianjiang.
"USA steals a lot of stuff too. But of course the American press won't tell you about that. Or if they mention it, they will put phrase it like "America liberated the population of Irak "
This is complete rubbish.
The US is not in the business of industrial espionage for commercial purposes - either on a corporate or governmental level, where China is.
Second - geopolitical issues have nothing to do with theft of IP, and usually not even resources (at least not in Central America).
'Central American countries' or 'Iraq' definitely have nothing to offer the US or anyone else in terms of the kind of IP theft one might be concerned about in China.
America did not 'steal' anything from Iraq - their Oil is their own, they receive 100% of the revenue, not only that, they are free to partner with any company they use, in fact, they ended up going with entities like Total (France), Statoil (Russia) etc. instead of US companies. (I guess as a 'thanks' for the fact they are now free to do as they please, and the Oil belongs to the people of Iraq instead of Saddam Co.)
"China is bad" because they steal IP, there is no rule of law, there is widespread corruption, pollution, there is total control of the people by the state and people dissapear of the street for no reason.
Literally, as we speak, China is incarcerating 100's of thousands, possibly millions of people due to their ethnicity or religion, and harvesting their organs as they are killed on trumped up charges. [1]
When we use the term 'Nazi' or 'concentration camps', usually it's hyperbole - but it's not: we now have a major power rounding up people by the millions due to ethnicity and culling their organs. This is actualy Nazi level stuff.
The level of moral relativism implied here is repulsive.
This is a very good anecdote, and helps us understand that 'shit' is in the eye of the beholder.
If it solves a real problem, and allows companies to do 'xyz' , maybe it doesn't matter if there are bugs and glitches here and there.
If there is only 'one kind of car' and that's all anyone knew, nobody would mind that there were always leaky oil issues if the alternative was 'horses'.
"Ballmer left a company that was a mess. He was boosting profits through repeated layoffs and price squeezing."
I see no evidence for your statement.
Ballmer 4x-ed MSFT revenue during his tenure.
He made far more money for MSFT than Gates ever did, and his growth track record is better than Satya so far.
Ballmer pushed XBox, Azure, Office/Cloud, re-orged the sales teams. Increased revenues for all the other major product lines.
Bing and Mobile were a fail, but they did other things well, moreover, they're up against the top 2 companies in the world in Search and Mobile - no easy feat.
All of your points are descriptive, but they don't really represent huge materiality in terms of business outcomes.
MS was never losing developers.
It's 'OSS contributions' really don't make that much of a difference.
Revenue under Satya has been up and down, with no real progress for his first several years until 2018 (2015 being the watermark).
MSFT today was made by Ballmer, most of the things you indicated are good, but not hugely fundamental.
Revenue peaked in 2015 when he took over, and only got past that in 2018. So net 'going down' until 2018. Yes, the stock has risen quite dramatically during his time though. Even has revenues went down - wall street dramatically lifted his valuation.
Contrast that with Ballmer, who consistently and reliably grew the company with solid numbers for over a decade, and was rewarded with a stock lift of 0.
The stock lift of MSFT over the last few years is the result of Ballmer. A) his tenure and B) the fact the stock was obviously suppressed a little bit during that time, only recently have the multiples been allowed to shift, and when they did ... the valuation jumped up.
Satya seems to be doing well, but for now it's mostly politics and perception. We'll have to wait and see if his material contributions lead to material change in terms of product and revenue at MSFT.
That's great but you haven't provided any specific examples.
Ballmer did not 'squeeze lemons' - he multiplied the company by like 4x. The 'cloud' FYI was a big new thing. All MS products have evolved quite a lot and are not the 'same products'.
What new products / initiatives has Satya introduced that are lining up to be the future of MS? That will replace the core products sometime?
The problem is - hosting repos, especially private ones, is not a 'complementary service' for Github. It's the core of their offer.
Edit: example - Google paying for Chrome, Android - this is 'complementary'. Google giving away free personal ads on search ... 'core'. MSFT giving away free dev tools, Bing search - complementary. Giving away 'Windows Home' for free ... 'core'.
If by 'zombie company' you mean raking in massive amounts of money and growing spectacularly every year? [1]
MSFT has changed in some positive ways, but since Satya took over, growth has been actually flat-ish to negative overall until 2018 (a good year). Paradoxically, MSFT stock was flat during the Ballmer years when there was rock solid consistent growth.
The 'new MSFT' things is quite overrated in terms of what it really means for the company overall. We HN readers tend to considerably overvalue actions that might seem positive, such as things like open source contributions. MS VS Code is great, but it's not hugely material next to core business. Most of the world really does not care, and they are buying gadzooks worth of MSFT products and services. For better or worse.
CEO's generally don't order this stuff to happen. More often it's a director, manager, VP or whatever that's just really aggressive. Possibly the CEO knew or not.
When a company gets bloodied for a pile of money, they generally have to own up to it, which makes them look bad (by they way, these things do have a cumulative effect) - but more importantly, they have to at very least 'go through the motions' of getting staff to 'not do this stuff'.
So they have 'training' and 'oversight' etc.. However ingrained it is into behaviour (or even a single rotten apple) the likelihood of recursion goes down.
For example - if an inner legal team gets some responsibility for oversight on these issues, they can make life difficult for managers on these things.
I worked at a Fortune 50 that was sued by a patent troll, and it seriously and fundamentally changed internal culture to the point wherein we needed lawyers involved in everything, it was really bad. Obviously a negative example.
But especially Microsoft has enough $ to drag Google into court, they should do it.
That said: I'll bet $100 that MS might be doing some tricky things of their own anyhow.
Google is a business like any other - and when they have the power to lever a monopolized situation - they will.
For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?
Or what if they integrate technology that de-facto collects usage and behaviour - even from other domains - and then lever that competitively?
The power that Google already has, relatively unregulated is crazy. Remember that Google is the company that could change the outcome of elections ... possibly without us even knowing. They could drive markets up or down at will.
This would probably happen as a 'slow drip' - not one step being close enough to consumer awareness to create problems, and what with 'business friendly' politicians, nary a worry of legislation getting in the way.
They could introduce these technologies under the guise of 'improving user experience' (and maybe legitimately so to start), but other PM's, new CEO's etc. just take the opportunity before them. Why wouldn't they?
We worry a lot about 'Net Neutrality' at the network level, like it's a religion ... but that we don't worry about 'information neutrality' as well I find quite bizarre.
I suggest that having '1 major provider' may be a problem, doubly so if it's an entity like Google, and that frankly we don't really gain much from this fact at all. If Mozilla were the provider, great. Even Apple might be a better choice simply because they are not in the business of managing our information - at least right now, for them, it's a headache, not a revenue source.
Coffee is ubiquitous and everyone can afford a $5 latte now and again. It's easy to 'try once' and then to stay hooked. They have the benefit of chemical addiction.
'Stationary bikes' are already a niche market to begin with, then add on the crazy price and monthly?
Crazy.
The problem with regular financing is that these things have little to no residual value, i.e. difficult resale. You can put a price on a used car so it can be kind of de-facto collateral. Not Pelotons.
I lived through the .com bubble and the last couple of years I feel warrant a lot of comparison.
The tech bubble burst because of a 'spook' i.e. interest rate change and massive bubble in the regular markets that needed to be cooled. So the smart money fled first, the dumb money later, and things became difficult.
The underlying economic impetus these days is reasonable - but it could be fudged any moment by Trump's 'trade wars' (I'm not saying anything about him or the policy, just that there is risk), or it could be revealed that a marginal shift in rates really does have a bad effect.
The all of the surplus 'lift' in the market evaporates and all of this gets wiped out.
ICO's in particular are a really bad sign.
CEO's are currently trying to get in on the IPO market while they can - with companies like Sonos popping on float day even with not particularly strong fundamentals.
It's not that startup land is bad, it's just that fundamentals don't justify the valuations.
These Peloton bikes and their services are way too expensive for mass market, and I'm not confident. It seems like one of many fitness fads to me.
Note: this is series F. At $4B Billion. This behoves the question, why not public? Maybe because any amount of public scrutiny wouldn't bear such a lofty valuation? It makes you wonder who's writing these big cheques. This is not Uber or AirBnB which have naturally massive markets and cashflows. These are $2K + $50 / month stationary bike / status symbols.