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The boost to Microsoft's share price expected from Windows 8 release in 2012.

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How ChatGPT and Microsoft are seen as upending the search business at Google. ChatGPT's ability to explain complex concepts and come up with new thoughts are seen as creating anew way of doing Search. Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in ChatGPT. Much of Google's efforts in the last five years have gone into preserving its monopoly of the search business without adding much through innovation and new ideas. The monopolistic behaviours have attracted the attention of regulators. Microsoft once a monopolistic behaviour company is now playing the role of a challenger with new ideas and concepts.

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$148 billion in cash savings from tax provisions and full expensing of investments in Big Beautiful Act for 369 companies, Amazon $15.7 billion in cash savings, Microsoft 12.5 billion from Big Beautiful Act 2025. Treasury Secretary Bessent described the full and immediate expensing provisions for investments by companies as a key provision that would take the US economy forward in 2025.

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Prodigous investments in AI data centers is crowding out investment in essential infrastructure that would cut the cost of living in the US. Such as investment in pharmaceuticals in the US, investment in automobiles and rare earth processing, in housing and schools would reduce cost of living by bringing down prices and provide huge human returns for every dollar spent in addition to larger profits over a long period. Shown here is the AI data center for Microsoft in Atlanta. Microsoft has invested $34 billion the first fiscal quarter of 2025 alone, with similar investments by Amazon, Tesla, Google, and others for $400 billion capital allocation in 2026. Investments are also being crowded out in the replacing of the aging infrastructure of the US  of roads, rail, subways systems, transport systems, bridges, airports and ports. Some of these investments such as in ports and logistics are needed to make America a manufacturing and exporting nation. Economists loved to talk about crowding out of investment by the private sector when the government spending was significantly higher as during and after World War II. Today there is little talk about the massive misallocation of capital in the US economy. Where public infrastructure is ravaged by time and mismanagement as in New York political trends are calling for free public transport  and supported grocery stores in NYC, when the root cause the overall picture of the Nation's spending in rebuilding America is ignored or unaddressed, which would get to the root cause of the cost of living and quality of life issues that concern all the people of this Nation. ...

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Apple and Microsoft make up 13.3% of the S&P 500. Apple makes up 7.1% of S&P 500. Other tech stocks such as Netflix, Google, Facebook and Amazon have lost value. Apple and Microsoft are the only two stocks that have gained ground. One has to go back to IBM and AT&T in 1978 to see two stocks with a significant share in the S&P 500. During the banking crisis Apple and Microsoft have acted as havens in the stock markets. Both energy and banking stocks have lost value. Tech stocks lost value in 2022 and are regaining some ground.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at the US Justice Department's trial of Google that the deal Google made with Apple led to its search engine becoming ubiquitous with monopoly power. Nadella said that the unfettered power of Google made it difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google on the internet. 

"Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with AI, I worry a lot that htis vicious cycle I am trapped in could get even more vicious." Nadella said that Google's deal with Apple made it oligopolistic.

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Microsoft is calling for governments worldwide to enact regulation of facial recognition technology in 2019 so that it requires independent assessment of accuracy and prevents ongoing surveillance of specific individuals without a court order. Facebook and Google face questions on respect of privacy. Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, Mr. Smith, says delays could "exacerbate social issues" and stated that society is badly served by "a commercial race to the bottom."  Smith cited George Orwell's novel, "1984," in which a government tracks citizen's movements. China is using mass surveillance technologies. Smith says three areas of concern are racial and gender bias, privacy and mass government surveillance. Export of these technologies is also an issue being raised by many people. AI Now co-founders from Microsoft and Google are also raising questions about harmful effects of AI and its use by tech companies without regulation. ...

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Microsoft shares were up 7% after the announcement about the departure of Steve Ballmer from the CEO position. Steve Ballmer became president in 1998 to run Microsoft's operations. He was a college buddy of Microsoft founder Bill Gates at Harvard. Ballmer graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics and economics and worked for 2 years at P&G before Gates persuaded him to join him at Microsoft. For decades the duo of Gates and Ballmer ran the company till Ballmer was made CEO in 2000. Ballmer completes three decades at Microsoft. During most of this period Ballmer focussed on protecting the existing franchise of Windows operating systems software and the Office suite sold on all PC's except Apple Macs. Missteps include Windows Vista, which was followed by the more successful Windows 7. Windows 8 has failed to make a significant dent in the market. A poor decision in retrospect to acquire Yahoo for about $44 billion did not happen, as Yahoo did not pursue discussions. The efforts in smartphones with Nokia and the Surface tablet have failed to produce results. Under Ballmer Microsoft only gradually shifted to cloud computing. The departure of Ballmer comes as a major reorganization was underway in 2013, and the company was shifting its strategy to become a provider of devices and services in place of its main role making software sales for PC's....

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Microsoft embraces open-source software for the first time. CEO Steve Ballmer once considered Linux open-source software "a cancer." Microsoft announces the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies in April 2012, as a unit that will manage the introduction of open source software programs and the compatibility of Microsoft software with open-source software. Cloud computing has strong elements of open-source software in it and Web services provided by Google and Facebook rely on Linus's open-source software. Younger programmers are trained with working on Linux and it is important for Microsoft to accept and work with the open-source software community to retain its influence in the field.

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One more instance of capital misallocation as $75 billion is diverted by Microsoft into gaming with violent videogames taking priority over investments in education and healthcare. Advances in education have been neglected by all the so-called technology companies at a time when online education can use a boost as students are in the third academic year when school attendance is disrupted. Instead taking gaming to the cloud is seen as the next frontier by companies from Sony and Tencent to Microsoft. Microsoft sees this as a consumer facing business when it is mostly in enterprise software, yet education and related lifestyle branches in music, sports, and others are by far the largest businesses directly interacting with users. Apple has done this with music, Disney with sports through ESPN, and education advances at a time of growing demand and use in the pandemic have not been answered.

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Satya Nadella joined Microsoft from Sun Microsystems in 1992. He is originally from Hyderabad, India, and studied electronics and communication engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology. In the U.S. he studied for a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and a MBA from the University of Chicago. At Microsoft Nadella worked on business areas Windows, Office suite of programs, the Bing Search engine, SQL Server database, and cloud service Azure, moving every couple of years. Langley, Clark and Ovide relate comments from classmates of the student days and colleagues at Microsoft about the 46 year old Nadella's aspiring nature, willingness to take risks and good rapport with engineers and staff at the company- including one comment from a former Microsoft executive that collaborative work spirit alone will not be enough to change Microsoft's culture.

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Bill Gates resigned his seat on Microsoft Board on March 13, 2020. This report in the WSJ looks at the situation at Microsoft in late 2019 when members of the Microsoft Board hired a law firm to conduct an investigation in late 2019 after a Microsoft female engineer's letter. This was a company that Gates founded and which expanded through acquisitions of other smaller companies.  The same day he resigned his seat on Berkshire's Board led by Warren Buffett. Mr. Gates started Microsoft in 1975, was CEO till 2000, and chairman till 2014. He then turned to work with his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.   Microsoft has market value of $1.8 trillion, Apple a value of $2.1 trillion.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of $37 billion income of $53 billion, and the personal assets of Bill and Melinda Gates have an estimated value of $130 billion. One of the mistaken assumptions is that any one foundation such as the Bill Gates foundation has the resources, knowledge, technologies, expertise and leadership to tackle problems that confront large countries such as the US, India, or a bloc such as European Union. Imagine some billionaire taking on the role of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt in tackling the Depression or a billionaire tackling the problem India faces today in public health. It is only governments of the US, India and large nations such as the UK that can pull together the resources needed and the cooperation needed between its industrial base companies to achieve goals for public health. This type of effort can pull together resources of trillions of dollars that no one company or billionaire or group of billionaires can put together, and pull together massive resources of engineers, scientists, and other people across hundreds of companies that cannot even be measured. This is one of the lessons of this pandemic because the WHO was left with the job of handling the pandemic and governments of US, France, UK, Germany, India, Russia and leading nations had retreated from their essential role as guardians of the public interest in people's health and left much of the task to others. As they reassume this role this needs to be given a firm and solid footing and lessons learned. ...

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The impact of disruptions in technology on H-P, Dell, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. The decline in PC sales with the iPad and iPhone, tablet PC's and Android smartphones, affects older companies such as Dell, H-P and Microsoft. Cloud computing and changes in database technology create disruptions and give new entrants and startups an edge.

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Layoffs at Microsoft, Amazon and Google are offset by more hiring. So that the companies are smaller by a small margin in 2023 compared to 2022, yet way larger than 2018. WSJ looks at the growing size of these companies. At Microsoft the headcount is 101,000 outside the US, a 70% increase since 2019. Apple's 161,000 employees are much higher than the 137,000 in 2019. A small trimming of employees only took down 3000 employees.

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Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, is intervewed by Shira Ovide of the WSJ. Compared to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella has a quiet demeanor. Responding to a question about how he made it from heading R&D for the Bing search engine to the CEO position, he says what helped him most was working in different jobs at Microsoft with different contexts and challenges, including a mix of some where success was achieved and some in which it was much harder. The experience of people in his management team is similar. He says his sense of being an outsider while being an insider is something he always had in him, and something he now encourages as a CEO. Reading outside of work is his only rule, and this may help him maintain some distance from work to think like an outsider. His preference is literary reading not common among senior managers- T.S. Eliot's poetry. Taking some off from work for medical leave or other reasons, is something he supports, especially from his own experience needing such leave as a 29 year old at Microsoft....