Summary: Microsoft's value falls well below Apple's and Credit Suisse gives Microsoft another small blow

THE MONOPOLIST from Redmond was downgraded last month (by Standard & Poor’s analyst Jim Yin) and the stock has been rather depressed since. Credit Suisse is now lowering its earnings estimates:

Credit Suisse lowered its earnings estimates of software giant Microsoft Corp. following Intel’s third quarter negative preannouncement.

The Financial Post has the article "Microsoft's flat stock needs a fat dividend to grow again, says activist shareholder" (also here) and another financial site bears the headline "Microsoft’s Depressed Stock Price Attracts Flock of Value Investors" (it remains to be seen though, Microsoft's 52-week low is $22.73 which is not terribly impressive).

Microsoft wishes to meet investors and the word "community' is used to refer to them, which is common. "[M]aybe it's an 'ecosystem' too," FurnaceBoy remarks comically ("ecosystem" is a word to avoid, according to GNU's philosophy).

For the sake of comparison, Apple's market cap at the moment is $236 billion. As for Microsoft's:

Microsoft Corp. has a market cap of $212.35 billion

Microsoft is part of the past, but the sociopaths who created it are up to new dangerous adventures including patent-trolling.

Increasingly it seems like the future is the Internet and Free software which gets shared over the Internet. In the past two week's news we found nothing about "Azure" (Google News search on headlines yields zero results for a week or so ago, even as far as two). Microsoft is still stuck in an age of pseudo-multi-user operating systems, no advanced networking/modularity, and not even high bandwidth and collaboration a la YouTube or Wikipedia, respectively. Microsoft is a CD-ROM in an age of gigabit/second Ethernet and it shows. From the news:

Printed encyclopedias are pretty much dead, and so even are DVD-based encyclopedias such as Microsoft's Encarta.

There are many other Microsoft projects/products that died recently. Is anyone surprised that Microsoft's value is eroding and analysts lose faith in it? ⬆