this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
587 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

79881 readers
3747 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
587
Microsoft’s $440 billion wipeout, and investors angry about OpenAI’s debt, explained (fortune.com)
submitted 2 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
90 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

3.2 trillion is a stupid amount of money, but it isn't all liquid. A 440 billion dollar hit (nearly 14%) would be very, very bad for them.

With the memory and SSD fiasco going on right now, fewer people are buying new PCs, which impacts their sales. Combined with the Windows 11 fiasco, the massive gaming division investments going nowhere, and the AI bubble, they're probably the most vulnerable they've been in decades.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

OEM license revenue represents a tiny tiny bit of their financials these days. They could just charge nothing for it and business wise no one probably notice much of a difference.

It is foundational to a lot of what they do, but older devices are just as good for their subscription and tie in revenue. Hell I use my work subscription for office from Linux, complete with OneDrive filesystem synchronization. Microsoft gets all their money from my headcount even as I don't even use Windows.

But that capex could bite them hard if revenue falls to follow from it. That's pretty much the only exposure investors care about.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

OEM licensing isn't the important part. It's everything that comes with it. Subscriptions, cloud storage, etc. In my city, a bunch of field workers are being moved from laptops to iPads and phones with the next hardware refresh due to the price jump in laptops. Microsoft won't have integrated Onedrive and SharePoint and full Office Subscriptions for them.

We already use third-party web apps that aren't Microsoft (and are mostly hosted by AWS) for a lot of their work, so the only Microsoft product they'll have is an email address.

Us abandoning the Windows laptops costs Microsoft hundreds a year per employee.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

When someone makes a better version of excel that's cross platform and not solely web based will be the final nail in the Microsoft coffin.