ASSET MANAGER: In Five Years Microsoft Will Be The Market's Most Valuable Company


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The last time we saw a slide deck from Cole Wilcox, of Longboard Asset Management, the firm was  arguing that Tesla is the new Apple, and that the stock was headed up to $200 a share.

 

Now the Longboard is out with a new "next Apple" to share with the market. It's the old Apple, actually ? Microsoft.

In its presentation, Longboard says that the current perception that Microsoft is, well, soft, is ignoring the success of Office 365, their #1 cloud business, and the potential earning power of Windows + Android hybrid devices.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/longboard-microsoft-slide-deck-2013-10?op=1#ixzz2iCisxswL

 

I think it's pretty easy to see how they came to their conclusions.  It'll be amusing to continue to watch people cry the death of Microsoft.

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What Micro$oft is doing in mobile reminds me of the briliant "Black Sunday" electronic countermeasure that DirecTV used to defeat hackers,and to this day, their conditional access system remains unbroken. They are slowly adding different pieces of the puzzle,and when it fully assembled, it will be a powerful weapon.

 

for reference

 

 

 

DirecTV began sending several updates at a time, breaking their pattern. While the hacking community was able to bypass these batches, they did not understand the reasoning behind them. Never before had DirecTV sent 4 and 5 updates at a time, yet alone send these batches every week. Many postulated they were simply trying to annoy the community into submission. The updates contained useless pieces of computer code that were then required to be present on the card in order to receive the transmission. The hacking community accommodated this in their software, applying these updates in their hacking software. Not until the final batch of updates were sent through the stream did the hacking community understand DirecTV. Like a final piece of a puzzle allowing the entire picture, the final updates made all the useless bits of computer code join into a dynamic program, existing on the card itself. This dynamic program changed the entire way the older technology worked. In a masterful, planned, and orchestrated manner, DirecTV had updated the old and ailing technology. The hacking community responded, but cautiously, understanding that this new ability for DirecTV to apply more advanced logic in the receiver was a dangerous new weapon. It was still possible to bypass the protections and receive the programming, but DirecTV had not pulled the trigger of this new weapon.

Last Sunday night, at 8:30 pm est, DirecTV fired their new gun. One week before the Super Bowl, DirecTV launched a series of attacks against the hackers of their product. DirecTV sent programmatic code in the stream, using their new dynamic code ally, that hunted down hacked smart cards and destroyed them. The IRC DirecTV channels overflowed with thousands of people who had lost the ability to watch their stolen TV. The hacking community by and large lost not only their ability to watch TV, but the cards themselves were likely permanently destroyed. Some estimate that in one evening, 100,000 smart cards were destroyed, removing 98% of the hacking communities' ability to steal their signal. To add a little pizzazz to the operation, DirecTV personally "signed" the anti-hacker attack. The first 8 computer bytes of all hacked cards were rewritten to read "GAME OVER".

 

 

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What Microsoft is doing in mobile reminds me of the briliant "Black Sunday" electronic countermeasure that DirecTV used to defeat hackers,and to this day, their conditional access system remains unbroken. They are slowly adding different pieces of the puzzle,and when it fully assembled, it will be a powerful weapon.

 

for reference

 

Got the source for that?

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I have long said Microsoft is the new IBM. IBM isn't dead and they do a very large amount of business. Most consumers have no idea they exist anymore though and they focus solely on Enterprise customers. Microsoft is losing the consumer game and they are poised to gain deeply in their traditional business stronghold. I can't see anyone disagreeing with this unless they are arguing from a biased fanboy perspective. Microsoft is doing very well with cloud computing and this will only grow, but it won't sell devices to consumers...

 

It is hard to predict if Microsoft will regain its value position compared to Apple or Google in 5 years, but they will hum along just fine behind the scenes.

 

That being said, I don't think anyone predicting the death of Microsoft did so in a fashion akin to Worldcom. The death message is meant as we will see them dominate our computing experience less and less. Even this presentation agrees with this. So, yes, Microsoft is "dying", but only in the sense that they will turn into something like Foxconn; powering legions of behind the scenes computing without consumers directly aware.

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I have long said Microsoft is the new IBM. IBM isn't dead and they do a very large amount of business. Most consumers have no idea they exist anymore though and they focus solely on Enterprise customers. Microsoft is losing the consumer game and they are poised to gain deeply in their traditional business stronghold. I can't see anyone disagreeing with this unless they are arguing from a biased fanboy perspective. Microsoft is doing very well with cloud computing and this will only grow, but it won't sell devices to consumers...

 

It is hard to predict if Microsoft will regain its value position compared to Apple or Google in 5 years, but they will hum along just fine behind the scenes.

 

That being said, I don't think anyone predicting the death of Microsoft did so in a fashion akin to Worldcom. The death message is meant as we will see them dominate our computing experience less and less. Even this presentation agrees with this. So, yes, Microsoft is "dying", but only in the sense that they will turn into something like Foxconn; powering legions of behind the scenes computing without consumers directly aware.

 

Losing the consumer game?  Their 90% PC marketshare hasn't wavered despite Windows 8, and their mobile marketshare is growing consistently.  As the presentation says, your perception of them seems to be incorrect, and it addresses the consumer side, though less so than the enterprise side.

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Losing the consumer game?  Their 90% PC marketshare hasn't wavered despite Windows 8, and their mobile marketshare is growing consistently.  As the presentation says, your perception of them seems to be incorrect, and it addresses the consumer side, though less so than the enterprise side.

Not really, they addressed the consumer side of the equation in a way that Microsoft has not, at least yet, perused heavily. Their rationale was that Android+Windows hybrid devices are the future for MS in the consumer space. If you're aware of MS' official strategy, or even any serious marketing efforts, going down this path I'd appreciate you sharing them; honestly.

 

The PC market share isn't going to go anywhere magical, no. The reality is mobile is where the growth is. The PC will keep its stronghold in the office and among professionals, but consumers will continue the trend that has been underway for at least half a decade, possible longer, of moving to lower cost consumption oriented devices that are portable. The average consumer isn't clamoring to go buy a computer and if they have one they are upgrading them very rarely. On the other hand, they are clamoring for newer tablets and phones on a yearly basis and adoption is going through the roof.

 

Microsoft may very well end up being the behind the scenes leader, as I suspect they will, but they won't be as known as they are now by consumers unless they did something magical to get mindshare back.

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Not really, they addressed the consumer side of the equation in a way that Microsoft has not, at least yet, perused heavily. Their rationale was that Android+Windows hybrid devices are the future for MS in the consumer space. If you're aware of MS' official strategy, or even any serious marketing efforts, going down this path I'd appreciate you sharing them; honestly.

 

The PC market share isn't going to go anywhere magical, no. The reality is mobile is where the growth is. The PC will keep its stronghold in the office and among professionals, but consumers will continue the trend that has been underway for at least half a decade, possible longer, of moving to lower cost consumption oriented devices that are portable. The average consumer isn't clamoring to go buy a computer and if they have one they are upgrading them very rarely. On the other hand, they are clamoring for newer tablets and phones on a yearly basis and adoption is going through the roof.

 

Microsoft may very well end up being the behind the scenes leader, as I suspect they will, but they won't be as known as they are now by consumers unless they did something magical to get mindshare back.

 

 

if you think they are after only or looking for Enterprises only, you might be wrong.

Surface Tablets, Nokia acquisition, Xbox.. these are all consumer related things rather than Enterprises. 

 

Their new vision is simple, "Everywhere Microsoft, For Everyone"

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I think it's pretty easy to see how they came to their conclusions.  It'll be amusing to continue to watch people cry the death of Microsoft.

And in 2006 it was predicted that Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform would have 29% market share by 2010 and we all know how that turned out.

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