Microsoft, Google and Qualcomm formally object to ARM/Nvidia deal

The saga is heating up.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/google-microsoft-qualcomm-protest-nvidia-s-arm-acquisition

Microsoft’s involvement is particularly interesting. I wonder if they’ve got plans to follow Apple’s lead and make ARM their CPU of choice?

Microsoft’s involvement is particularly interesting. I wonder if they’ve got plans to follow Apple’s lead and make ARM their CPU of choice?

YES they do, Windows on ARM and also they are working on creating their own ARM based laptop.

Qualcomm on the other hand has just got the top guys on ARM design:

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/01/13/qualcomm-acquire-nuvia#:~:text=Qualcomm%20Incorporated%20(NASDAQ%3A%20QCOM),working%20capital%20and%20other%20adjustments.

If you do not know who is Nuvia, then think this: Nuvia founder Gerard Williams III is Apple ex Chief CPU Architect and big ARM architecture expert… starting to connect dots?

As I said in some other forum, 2020/2021 is ARMageddon guys! :D

the Opensource embracement by MS in there current form has my interest peaked.

Me too, but I’m trying to figure out where the sting in the tail is.

Remember – we’re talking about Microsoft here. There’s no way in hell that company is suddenly going to “go open source”. There’s got to be an ulterior motive.

There’s got to be an ulterior motive

Software as a Service.
Windows 10 saw the move to providing the OS. Win7, Win 8.x – just upgrade to 10.

It “includes” Office 365 – except 365 is basically just a shim on the client to access the server based stuff. Keep paying if you want to keep using.
You want storage? they have loads. Putting your data there costs nothing, pulling it back is chargeable…

I almost wonder if it is the end of the OS company, and a return to the primarily Programming Languages company?

Have you ever come across the marketing term “loss-leader”?

Have you ever come across the marketing term “loss-leader”?

Not until you just mentioned it. [pauses to look it up in DuckDuckGo]

Ok after a quick look at the term, yes that is exactly what I am thinking MS may be doing.

Astounding. I’ve just educated a resident of the land of the mighty dollar and wall-to-wall marketing on the subject of loss-leaders. That’s going to keep me happy for quite a while.

I almost wonder if it is the end of the OS company, and a return to the primarily Programming Languages company?

Since MS was most of the time primarily an “Office company”, secondarily an “OS company” and now on the way to become a “Cloud/Service company”, I don’t think they could ever return to being primarily a Programming Language company, since they never were one.

Making money from development tools seems to be out of fashion, so I doubt that MS start to generate any meaningful income from programming language stuff. Developers are just no longer keen on paying for that stuff – ask Borland how that turned out for them. f course there are still niche players making money from such things (in the embedded space, or clever guys like IntelliJ, or ACT in a niche-niche market), but I can’t see MS targetting niche markets anytime soon.

You are completely right about the beginnings of Microsoft as a “Programming Language” company of course – I somehow completely forgot about the various BASIC implementations they did.

Starting with Multiplan however, and of course MS-DOS, that changed completely.

So what does that leave MS to make money on. Surely there Gaming division is not enough to sustain the company.

They have diversified a lot in recent years.

But around 70% of revenue still comes from Office (including the cloud stuff), Server products/cloud services and Windows. Gaming amounts to 7% which I find impressive. LinkedIn provides 5% of their revenue. Even adverts from Bing are a notable part of the revenue. Surprising.

And the revenue increases year by year, across the board. So when you write

The OS market is pretty much past commercial as well, so they can not do much there.

you seem to be very wrong.

…in the company I work (20.000 employes) we got transformed to 100% Microsoft powered OS/Office cloud system (and I guess we are not the only ones), because somebody said it’ll be cheaper than having your own server and stuff…I doubt it…all I can say it kind of works most of the time, but now you are so vulnerable/dependant on the network, kind of crazy…sometimes you really have those 80’s computer times effect when you have to wait lots of seconds until some shitty small document opens or closes…no SSD or 4 GHz CPU will help you then…that never happened when we had our own servers…okay, as far as they didn’t crash ;-)

…so to me MS will earn even more money, as I guess this works now with a constant subsciption scheme fee instead of single software licences and some service…and I won’t even start talking about cloud/security in the hands of a US company…

in the company I work (20.000 employes) we got transformed to 100% Microsoft powered OS/Office cloud system (and I guess we are not the only ones), because somebody said it’ll be cheaper than having your own server and stuff…I doubt it…

At my work it was always about keeping up with the Joneses. It’s more expensive than having it all on-site.

in the company I work (20.000 employes)

It must be a German company to specify the number of employees to 3 decimal places! :)

Above you gave a nice breakdown of there income, that accounts for greater than 82%, and does not account for how much is from advertising, or HW products, or Software Development products/services, so obviously somewhere way north of 85% WITHOUT considering OS products, maybe even north of 95% without the OS market?

I guess you have missed the “Windows” word (a big part of those 70%)? And the “Server” part also includes parts of Windows of course.

The important part however is that “Windows” is still growing revenue for them, year by year. Same for the Office stuff. They are not the big growth driver (which is the cloud business atm), but it is still growing. So definitely not “past commercial” as you put it. Red Hat proves the same by the way, and they have the much harder task of making money from something that is fundamentally “free”.

Red Hat proves the same by the way, and they have the much harder task of making money from something that is fundamentally “free”.

Red Hat & Fedora, basically do you want support or not.

You want storage? they have loads. Putting your data there costs nothing, pulling it back is chargeable

That’s only the case if you host severs in the cloud, if you go zero infrastructure there’s no cost to either store or retrieve data.

It’s more expensive than having it all on-site.

What people often forget is the cost of: staff to support onprem, cost of office space, travel costs, out of hours maintenance costs, aircon, power, fire suppression, WAN links, firewalls, 4 year upgrade cycle etc.

I’m now at the tail end of a 2 year project I was brought in to run, to replace IT. Cost models were worked out up front comparing the current solution, traditional onprem, traditional cloud and zero-infrastructure cloud. The later is about 1/3 of the cost of the current and half the cost of new onprem, and that’s using M365 E5 licensing which is the most expensive (~£50 / month / user)

If you don’t need the E5 levels of security, the lower tears are a lot cheaper.