You know, Im not certain, but I think the job of being a cunty CFO could be done by AI… Are you listening Microshaft?
Societal collapse. Greed has won.
So dramatic, LOL
These people are fucking insane, Greed is a sickness and with Trump in the white house the disease is absolutely flourishing.
it’s crazy for me to watch people rapidly waking up to that fact after i’ve said it for what feels like decades and was completely ignored for the longest time.
Collaborate in a few more genocides eh Microsoft
Very happy to see my employer slowly moving away from their shitty products.
All they’re good for is stress, frustration, and justifying the jobs of old Sys Admins that sit in ivory towers.
The rest of the world is moving on. I challenge them to show growth next year.
I remember it when old sysadmins would remember OS/2, Fidonet and be respectful to FreeBSD (despite not having touched it for many years). And I’m kind young.
There are now “old” sysadmins loyal to Windows? Something is wrong with this decade.
quick, shut down activision blizzard king, bethesda, and xbox game studios before they make any more money
God I can’t wait to get out of the grind.
I’m over halfway to freedom, I really want FIRE so I never have to deal with this corporate bullshit again.
Publicly traded companies have to continually make more money than they did last month, last quarter, same time last year.
Failing to do so means they are somehow “losing” money that is “rightfully owed” to them and the stock market punishes them.
It doesn’t matter if you’re profitable or not, so long as you’re continually making more money.
Yeah, except for Tesla, how the fuck man.
Mmhmm compare that with the sales numbers, then compare against any company in history which has had a similar sales pattern for a publicly traded company.
It’s not only “more”. The company I work for had “record profits, far and beyond anything we were expecting” in 2021. In 2022, we were told that the company made more than in 2021, but didn’t meet the earnings projections. That’s still record profits, but phrased like a loss.
Not only must the line go up, but it has to go up faster than it did before. Nothing less than exponential growth.
It’s supposed to be growth related to the things which didn’t progress, so to say. So it’s not literally supposed to be growth of processes, just that stagnation makes things diminish in value, and compared to them things more alive “grow”. Something like that.
Kinda like inflation. And that’s fine, that can describe a pretty sustainable society, it’s not about consuming more and more, it’s like rotation.
Except with today’s oligopolies there’s a different idea, that they really have to grow as in capturing more and more of humanity’s resources. The AI bubble (or not) is their most recent approach to that.
That’s because expectations were shaped by the 90s when many things exploded (unfortunately much of that were countries, also landmines and other expendable means of destruction).
In the 00s it was possible to create illusion of that explosion still going on brighter and brighter, despite just continuing what started in the 90s, and then to create a few large-scale scams (or madness pandemics, or tech fashions, whatever ; point is they weren’t the same as years 1993-1999) with iPhones, new Apple in general, Google, Facebook, Twitter.
I’m not saying it was fake or worthless, it was a revolution too, but not what companies try to show since the dotcom bubble.
So - they are still trying to show that, with kinda rough, generic, and insincere effort, a bit like sex workers in their makeup.
And they can’t show that without such expansion in width, not in height.
It goes a layer further than that even. If the rate at which that growth is happening isn’t itself growing then investors start getting nervous.
They actually have a legal obligation to maximize profits.
Technically they don’t - it’s a lie told often by CEO. But its a lie. https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Fiduciary-Duties-of-the-Board-of-Directors.pdf
the way i understand it, the company has an obligation to fulfill “shareholder’s requests”, which is maximizing profits in 99% of cases, at least on publicly traded companies.
Same document, section about Shareholders.
There’s no such thing. There COULD be something like shareholders voting on smthing and those votes are binding, but the agenda is declared by the company and can be only shiet like dividends rate, certain acquisitions, etc. Not the company strategy itself.
“We’re entering FY26 with clear priorities in security, quality, and AI transformation, building on our momentum and grounded in our mission and growth-mindset culture,” Hood wrote, mentioning Nadella’s email. “Both the pace of change and customer expectations are continuously accelerating.”
Hood’s email, notably, didn’t mention Microsoft’s recent workforce cuts, which have exceeded 10,000 this year even as profit swells. Nadella’s email last week attempted to explain this “seeming incongruence” as the “enigma of success.” Some employees weren’t satisfied with the explanation.
These people get paid so much for spouting this utter bullshit every day. I hope they have moments when they realize the hollowness of what they do.
the hollowness of what they do
i suspect they intentionally hollow out their soul to save weight or sth
Burn the business colleges to the ground
“The enigma of success” whoever came up with that line has truly mastered the art of auto-fellatio.
They know every single word is hollow. Eat it and rejoice peasant. Are you not filled?
Agreed. What even the fuck is that string of complete nonsense? These C-suite dipshits say it so much, someone is eating it up.
The “someone” is the investors, or generally speaking, the market.
Major CEOs can’t say they’re taking a financial hit, for whatever reason. This is why I like working for small companies, and most Americans work for small businesses.
Last company: CEO announced to the board that he intended to lose money in order to build staff and products. Yes, he even included tech debt. The board applauded him.
Meh, we fucked around and still made a profit, so he gave the board the same report the following year, same results. We fucked around a made a profit. Again.
tl;dr: Don’t mistake all CEOs for the bullshit you hear from Nadella and Musk and the like. Remember; You only hear crazy talk reported, because it’s crazy talk.
Kinda like HMOs. You only hear about the bad ones because people in good ones don’t bitch about them at every opportunity.
Worked for a company like that, but not everyone was happy. Investors were brought in and place went to shit. Sucks, but I got out just as it started getting worse.
I would say Nadella is the biggest bullshitter of them all. I don’t think I’ve heard him speak a single non-bullshit sentence.
They’re trying to tell their “stakeholders”, employees, customer, shareholders, what to believe, what to think that’s the bullshit dazzle spell to preserve your suspension of disbelief just a little longer.
That’s the thing though. If I as an employee heard the CEO spout this crap, I would laugh at them. It’s ridiculous. Use real sentences with real meanings.
That’s why they’re at the podium and expect peer pressure to keep everyone quiet until they can retreat back into their lair
customer expectations are continuously accelerating
Just make a functional OS that doesn’t get in user’s ways. Those are the expectations.
Microsoft doesn’t expect growth in their OS offerings. These days all their focus is on AI and cloud.
I wounder how this person defines quality in their mind?
“intensity, clarity, and bold execution”
Not just “intensity”.
Maybe if they keep going and add a few more words it will magically start to mean something.
Take note. It’s never enough, no matter how much you give.
Do more with less.
In good times and bad.
Work your wage.
also work for what you believe in, whether that be community service, supporting your neighbours, making a computer game, chatting with friends, everything helps as long as you can believe in it with your heart
Microsoft has/had good wages.
clicks reply
Intensity huh? Here you go
@#$% YOU
- cloud services exceeded $75 billion
- Office productivity software and LinkedIn, delivered $33.11 billion in revenue
- Personal Computing unit, which encompasses Windows, search advertising, devices and video games, totaled $13.45 billion
Writing is on the wall. Xbox and Windows made money, but a fraction of what Office and enterprise services made.
That is how it has been for a long time at Microsoft. They know Enterprise is where the money is, it hasn’t stopped them from trying to venture out into other areas tho.
They stopped venturing a long time ago. Microsoft should’ve been split up. Then maybe some of their consumer products would’ve survived and thrived. Even Windows OS seems like an afterthought these days.
Wait until Windows SE (subscription edition) comes out and you have to pay for it monthly… that’ll get those numbers up!
I dunno. MS has become such a behemoth that us home users suffer nothing these days. Apparently they can pay enough, and enough workers, to keep consumer Windows alive. Why kill the golden goose? As to Office, that requires the bigger goose to run on top of.
Always an unpopular take around here, but I don’t have 1/20th the issues lemmy tells me I should be enduring under Windows 11. No telling how old my install is. Started with Win10, years and years ago, swapped SSDs a time or two. Only reason I reboot is when the power blinks. (need a new UPS battery)
This from a guy that reinstalled Windows weekly in the 90s. Meh. Works fine now.
Vertical integration, though. Windows underpins office, and even cloud services.
Xbox though, they’ve already pretty much written its epitaph.
Isn’t Linux mostly used for cloud services though?
Xbox should’ve been the prestige product for Microsoft (just like Logic/Final Cut for Apple) but Xbox itself depleted any prestige it ever accumulated over the last few years.
Xbox is actively being dropped from Target and Walmart, but it doesn’t help that the push is for digital games with no physical presence in stores.
its like what AWS for amazon, its delivery/online market pale in comparison to thier licensing to the govt and other services.
At what point will we look at these numbers with skepticism? When not one worker is left who can afford their services nor one customer left who wants anything to do with their utterly shit “products” - but they still blow out the quarter with 100 billion? At what point will society recognize that this money can’t possibly represent anything actually real? Will it matter if all of us starve to death and only billionaires are left if the Microsofts of the world will still be able to post 200 billion dollar “profits”?
I’m actually curious. Because I personally think that’s increasingly what all this is. Fake as shit. Some combination of algorithms, cryptocurrency, dark pools and I dunno, the Illuminati I guess.
Business contracts and licenses are MS’s bread and butter. They don’t give a shit about individuals, they know we pirate Windows, and they don’t care. But if a business pirates Windows…
I wouldn’t say it’s fake, it’s the money other companies steal from their workers by not paying a fair wage being given to Microsoft to burn at the pyre of ai.
I mean, I don’t disagree that that’s historically what it’s been. But increasingly, it seems like record profits just keep going through the roof no matter what. And record stock market numbers. And record everything. Nothing goes down, not substantially. Negative news seems to have no (net) effect anymore.
It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.
In theory the line should go up, population increases, technology allows us to become more efficient, inflation etc. That said what’s going down is at least the standard of living, employment, adjusted wages. Personally I’d put money on the AI bubble popping and crashing the market eventually but who knows how long that’ll take
The money is real. Perhaps you don’t work somewhere that pays to use Microsoft Enterprise services, but there are many and a lot are huge. Those companies build and/or do tangible things that others or consumers buy.
That doesn’t mean the money is real.
If we’re going to get into a debate about what money is and represents, you might have an argument. If we accept that we use currency to exchange for goods, services, and labor, it is real money.
Then what is the function of the stock market for the economy?
You are arguing for an extremely simplistic vision of money that does not exist.
The stock market is a way to publicly trade partial ownership of companies. The value of a stock is whatever people are willing to pay for it. That’s based on speculation but at least somewhat anchored in the companies’ revenues and profits/losses.
The revenues and profits/losses are real values reported quarterly. Projected revenues are just that - estimated future predictions. Of course there can be fraud, but that’s unlikely from a company as large as Microsoft.
Event DJT, which has a valuation based on nothing but speculation and political loyalties still reports that they are losing money hand over fist.
The stock market is a way to publicly trade partial ownership of companies. The value of a stock is whatever people are willing to pay for it. That’s based on speculation but at least somewhat anchored in the companies’ revenues and profits/losses.
Sometimes it is but no the stock market is often very unanchored from any real sense of value and as a result all of the money involved becomes a part of something unreal that will catastrophically collapse at a later point.
Exhibit A) See Uber, it isn’t even a business in any pure capitalist sense since it has never or almost never turned a profit.
No, the macro-economic function of the stock market is to determine the capitalist value of things, the stock market IS the hallucination at the center of the value of currencies like the US dollar.
You clearly believe in some magical power of rationality to the stock market like people believe in God, I can only debate you so far before your rhetorical defenses become purely emotional and based on feelings not facts.
The only one making irrational arguments is you. I think you have some ideological points you want to score and are therefore not looking at what is being commented or grasping the reality of financial reporting.
How do you know Uber isn’t profitable? Because Uber is reporting it is not profitable. The question that started this thread is whether Microsoft is accurately reporting its profits. It is. So is Uber.
Whether the stock prices are irrational is irrelevant to the question.
Big companies are subject to constant audits. You, too, can check their balance sheets that are released and scrutinize the numbers.
While you may personally dislike MS products, most of the world’s businesses and governments run on them. That’s licensing money every month without fail. They can literally charge whatever they want because companies with staff want Office and Windows Server backend.
Capitalism is collapsing under the weight of record profits and additional billionaires.
