[amanne]

That's a lot of blanket statements states as if they were the truth.

>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.

Uhh, why not?

>Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.

Again, reference?

>You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving

Share price is diving? As compared to what? If you read the "article" you can see that the share price was ~28 just three months ago and today it closed at more than $31.

> ..and all your customers are hopping ship.

I am completely lost with the extreme hyperbole here.

[300bps]

Share price is diving? As compared to what?

Well for starters let's compare MSFT to AAPL. Here's a chart comparing them over the last 12 months:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT+Interactive#symbol=m...

If that link works correctly, any unbiased party will clearly acknowledge that in the past year Microsoft is up 15.5% (including today's slide) while Apple is down 30.0%.

So - the question becomes - precisely whose share price is diving? The clear answer is Apple, while Microsoft has done little but gone up over the last 12 months.

[CamperBob2]

That's because AAPL had something to lose. At their peak they were worth three DELLs more than MSFT.

[onebaddude]

Interesting.

At its peak, how much bigger was MSFT than Apple?

Hint: Lots.

[CamperBob2]

We're only concerned with recent history here, though, aren't we?

Everything I needed to know about Steve Ballmer -- and Microsoft's future -- I learned when he laughed at the iPhone on national TV.