skingers

Interesting article.  Under Ballmer/Gates I would have said "no way" but this is a different MS now.  They care more about the cloud and their apps running on everything now more so than the user OS.  The article is right, they have no viable portable platform now, iOS and Android dominate and are more important than desktop or laptop OS instances now.  The Windows OEM business is actually worth much less in terms of revenue than just the Mac business alone and is utterly dwarfed by iPhone and iPad.  End point IS dying for Windows and with it being a diminishing part of MS revenue their focus is going to be "azure, office 365 and Xbox in the cloud for all" more so than protecting a shrinking user OS share.

What's interesting about this is that people often confuse "new unit market share" with "in use" share.  Macs are only around 8% of the units sold worldwide and yet Mac os is running at over 20% in use share.  Why?  I assume this means the replacement rate for PCs is much greater - IE Macs last longer and do not need to be replaced as often.  It's really the only way that in use share can outpace units sold share.  What's significant about this is that for software developers 8% does not sound all that interesting but 21% and growing certainly does.

red oak said:

“Four Giants”.   Lol

Apple is literally 50% of BH now.  

Apple is 50% of the holdings in their equities portfolio of Brk yes, but the biggest part of their business by far is the subsidiaries they own outright.  They are a massive conglomerate of businesses that made net earnings of 90 Billion last year.  Apple paid a total of 14.5 Billion in dividends to all stockholders so Brk would have seen about 785 Million of that in 2021 for their stake.  Since they did not sell any Apple stock in 2021 that means that 89.2 Billion came from non-apple elements of Brk.  So 50% of the stocks portfolio yes, but nowhere near "50% of BH".

crowley said:

skingers said:

danox said:

9secondkox2 said:

Great news. Bungie benefits and gamers benefit.

Bungie is an insanely great developer these days. Perhaps the single best house on the market.

Great buy. 

Hardly, nothing but crap will come out of it….The state of gaming is the same as Music, Movies, and TV most of it bad……game play has died, picking your kids allowance ie…the parents credit card is the only thing happening these days…..

Really cannot agree with this.  Sony first party games like The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and God of War have been some of the best games and story telling within games ever.  Bungie as part of the Sony stable is great news for them and gaming in general. 

From reading more about this, it’s being framed as a technology purchase, that Sony want to invest big in “online, live service” games. That’s a very different prospect from the other first party games you mention, and not an area I’m interested in at all.  Could well be lucrative for Sony, but I don’t know that it’s good news for gaming.

I do agree with you here.  The fact that they get one of the biggest ever MMO and FPS franchises of all time is gravy, very smart acquisition for Sony.

fastasleep said:

9secondkox2 said:

Great news. Bungie benefits and gamers benefit.

Bungie is an insanely great developer these days. Perhaps the single best house on the market.

Great buy. 

Uh... they literally have one game currently, Destiny 2. I must assume you're a huge Destiny 2 fan, otherwise you'd have zero reason to say this. They're most certainly not the "single best house on the market" — that's insane.

Well you can argue whether or not they are the "best house on the market" but they did create a title that has become synonymous with content that is more important than the system with "the Halo effect" and then, as you mention did go on to have lightning strike again with Destiny 2 being the biggest MMO of all time after WoW and the second biggest selling FPS shooter of all time.  Making this a pretty decent platform to compete with whatever MS is doing with Activision/Blizzard at a tiny 5% of that purchase price.  This is only partly about buying Destiny, it's about buying pedigree and know how.