MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
117.29 -0.36 (-0.31%)
After hours: 7:59PM EDT
| Previous Close | 117.57 |
| Open | 118.09 |
| Bid | 117.20 x 4000 |
| Ask | 117.30 x 1400 |
| Day's Range | 116.99 - 118.44 |
| 52 Week Range | 87.08 - 118.44 |
| Volume | 37,588,697 |
| Avg. Volume | 33,161,610 |
| Market Cap | 902.636B |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 1.02 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 27.29 |
| EPS (TTM) | 4.31 |
| Earnings Date | Apr 24, 2019 - Apr 29, 2019 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | 1.84 (1.59%) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | 2019-05-15 |
| 1y Target Est | 126.36 |
Yahoo Finance•9 hours agoGoogle unveils Stadia video game streaming service
Google has debuted its new Stadia game streaming service.
- CNBC Videos•6 hours ago
Rep. Thompson summons tech giants to DC over New Zealand ...
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) is calling on tech giants Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter to testify next week at Capitol Hill following the New Zealand Christchurch attacks. CNBC's Sue Herera reports.
- Engadget•13 hours ago
Microsoft Teams beefs up with new features as it turns two
Microsoft Teams, the company's Slack-like workplace collaboration tool, iscelebrating its second birthday this week
- Reuters•2 hours ago
U.S. lawmaker says tech companies must quickly remove violent content after New Zealand
Following the live-streaming on social media of the mass shooting in New Zealand, the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security wrote a letter to top executives of four major technology companies urging them to do a better job of removing violent political content. In a letter dated Monday and released on Tuesday, Representative Bennie Thompson urged the chief executives of Facebook Inc , Alphabet Inc's Google, which owns YouTube, Twitter Inc and Microsoft Corp to more swiftly remove content that would spawn political extremism.
- Motley Fool•3 hours ago
Better Buy: Apple vs. Microsoft
Which of these two tech giants deserves a place in your portfolio?
- TheStreet.com•3 hours ago
Alphabet Aims to Remake Gaming with Stadia -- But Gamers Have a Lot of Questions
To an audience of developers and game enthusiasts at GDC this week, Google took the wraps of Stadia, a game streaming platform that the company says will revolutionize the way games are experienced. Alphabet's shares were up 1.17% on Tuesday. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and a fleet of executives premiered Stadia at a keynote event, which billed Stadia as a "game platform for everyone" that will work on any device or browser.
- CNBC•6 hours ago
Congressman calls on tech CEOs to explain the spread of the mosque shooting video on their platforms
House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson wrote to the CEOs of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft requesting a briefing next week on the spread of violent content on their platforms. Thompson's request follows Friday's mosque shootings in New Zealand, where a suspected shooter livestreamed a video of one of the attacks, which was later shared repeatedly on tech platforms.
- Investor's Business Daily•6 hours ago
Cloud Gaming Is Poised To Shake Up The Video Game Industry
Cloud gaming represents the next major frontier for the video game industry. As the focus of gaming shifts from consoles to streaming from data centers, it could bring forth new leaders.
- Investor's Business Daily•6 hours ago
Google Stock Gains As Stadia Game Streaming Service Launched
Alphabet's Google rolled out its cloud-based, video game-streaming service called Stadia. The service makes box consoles unnecessary, possibly heralding a major shift in the future of gaming.
- Investor's Business Daily•6 hours ago
Nvidia Stock Surges On Data Center Wins From Amazon, Google, Microsoft
Graphics-chip maker Nvidia announced a flurry of product news and customer wins at a presentation late Monday at its GPU Technology Conference. The news sent Nvidia stock higher on Tuesday.
- Reuters•6 hours ago
Google announces browser-based streaming game service
Alphabet Inc's Google announced on Tuesday that it would launch this year a browser-based video game streaming service dubbed Stadia that attempts to capitalize on the company's cloud technology and global network of data centers. The technology allows users to play games through their internet browser or YouTube without waiting for content to be downloaded to a device, making access to games potentially as easy as watching a video from YouTube.
- InvestorPlace•7 hours ago
Google’s Stadia Leaves Us With More Questions Than Answers
One of the companies making the biggest splash at 2019's Games Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco isn't Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) or Sony (NYSE:SNE) … it's Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google, which just announced its own dedicated cloud streaming platform for gaming -- Stadia.Source: Stadia The move to cloud gaming has long been suspected. Google spent the past few months testing "Project Stream," which gave users access to Assassin's Creed Odyssey through Chrome of all places.By most accounts, it was a success, with Polygon's Austen Goslin describing the experience of the browser, cloud-based stream as "surprisingly great":InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips"The first, and most surprising, thing you'll likely notice when the game loads is that it … works. Assassin's Creed Odyssey runs about as well from the cloud as if you had just installed the game normally. Movement is responsive, and combat feels fluid. Even dodging enemy attacks was easy, and I never fell victim to the kind of input lag that has often plagued game streaming in the past."That's high praise.I've played my fair share of game streams via Sony's PlayStation Now, and the experience was nothing short of miserable. With Stadia, Google has shown (from GDC's stage) instant access to games from the jump -- no downloading or waiting. But will it actually work that well, for everyone, consistently? * 7 Video Game Stocks on Steep Discount And why would Google decide to jump into the video game fray? What's the upshot here, if any, for GOOGL stock? Let's unpack this bit by bit. Why Google Thinks It's a Good IdeaWhen I first heard that Alphabet Inc's Google would be unveiling a gaming platform, my first thought was "remember Google Plus", followed by "remember Google Glass", followed by … you get the idea. There's a reason Alphabet was formed in the first place (aside from the muddy politics of ownership) -- to eke out its moonshots from the rest of the business.I have doubts that Google's gaming ambitions will fall into the "serious" money-making side of Alphabet's business. (GOOGL stock is pretty much flat today, as investors are also lukewarm about all of this.)As Twitch streamer "King Gothalion" put it live on stream this morning: "I don't think gamers will support it … it would be like Facebook getting into the gaming industry." I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of what he said. And I agree. The only serious contribution Facebook brought to the video game industry, it bought. Aside from that, FB has tried and failed to crack the gaming-verse for several years, finding brief success with flashes in the pan (Farmville) but nothing that would momentously impact its business. Most people don't even have faith in Oculus anymore. So why would Google think it can compete?It doesn't.Google's endgame here is what its endgame has always been -- access to more users' data. Facebook may not have beaten Microsoft or Sony, but its social-based games did attract people into its ecosystem and "persuaded" them to give up more of their data. If Google can accomplish this, it has a loss leader it can live with.Think about the troves of data it can collect by siphoning gamers into its ecosystem, as they buy, stream, watch and use any number of Google services across any number of devices.Sure enough, a gaming system that exists purely in the cloud does stimulate curiosity -- access to triple-A games without having to buy an expensive gaming system that you're only going to replace in three to five years? Instant access, and the ability to seamlessly move from device to device without stopping your game? Yeah, I'd at least check that out.Since Google's streaming platform doesn't require a console and, instead, will be playable on Chrome or any number of everyday devices, and because Google's already-existent data centers will handle the heavy calculations required to stream, there's really nothing for Google to invest in here aside from games developers themselves, and the talent to run Stadia. That's a drop in the bucket for Alphabet Inc. Why It's a Terrible IdeaThere's the big question of how Google expects to pull off the glossy promises it made about Stadia.Because of its very nature, you need to always be online to play games on Stadia. That didn't work out well when Microsoft tried it with Xbox One back in 2013, and I don't expect it to work now.When Microsoft attempted to bill the Xbox One as an always-online console, one of its employees told people to "deal with it" in regards to not always having internet access:Source: EngadgetNo matter how perfect it looked on stage, there are always issues when dealing with internet speeds in the real world, in real time. The same Polygon writer who praised the platform for its responsiveness also found some issues [emphasis mine] in Project Stream's test:"The only consistent downside to the streaming version of the game, which I found across all hardware and connections I tried, was some fairly aggressive audio compression. This was, at its very worst, a noticeable issue, and that was only during some of the game's louder cutscenes. For the most part, while wandering around the world and completing quests, the audio was perfectly fine."Imagine if you were a user in, say, rural Virginia? How would this work without an extensive infrastructure overhaul?Google didn't even try to alleviate these concerns, skipping over questions about input lag and general connectivity issues completely. How fast does one's internet need to be to stream games optimally?No one knows. * 5 of the Best Stocks to Buy Under $10 But seriously, how tone deaf are Alphabet's executives to think that releasing this now, let alone at all, would be a good idea?We live in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, and a world where YouTube's algorithm is so broken, it's directing users to white supremacist content from, interestingly enough, video game streamers. The last thing Google should be doing is pointing more people in the way of a broken system, touting it as a feature and not a bug.Instead, Google is releasing an always-online platform to interact more deeply with YouTube's faulty algorithm, complete with a controller and a microphone to access Google Assistant.Good luck, I guess.As of this writing, John Kilhefner did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. More From InvestorPlace * 2 Toxic Pot Stocks You Should Avoid * 7 Financial Stocks to Invest In Today * 7 Single-Digit P/E Stocks With Massive Upside * 5 Chip Stocks on the Rise Compare Brokers The post Google's Stadia Leaves Us With More Questions Than Answers appeared first on InvestorPlace.
GuruFocus.com•7 hours agoRisk-Reward With Tableau Software
Imagine the next Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio) piling through data sets via a fancy dashboard and that's what the future probably looks like. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Signs with DATA. Tableau has zero competitive advantages, and many very well capitalized legacy software companies with built-in customer bases are already mimicking its feature set, which has set a hard cap on the company's growth potential.
- InvestorPlace•8 hours ago
5 Cloud Stocks to Help Your Portfolio Fly
Cloud stocks are divided into three categories: the cloud owners, the cloud arms merchants, and the cloud users.The five Cloud Czars -- Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon.Com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) -- all built clouds with cash flow from existing businesses. Apple and Facebook still run this way.Clouds are built on open source software and commodity hardware. They're meant to give their biggest benefits to users. Companies built using the cloud can become huge, like Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU), Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) and Salesforce.com (NASDAQ:CRM).InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading TipsThen there are the cloud arms merchants, companies whose main business is providing hardware and services to cloud owners. These include Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Dell Technologies (NASDAQ:DELL). * Top 7 Service Sector Stocks That Will Pay You to Own Them Analysts have lately become enamored of cloud arms merchants as large enterprises build their own data centers on the cloud model, creating the "hybrid" cloud. That's the first place to seek cloud growth today.Here's how to get your share. Microsoft (MSFT): The Unpunished CzarSource: Shutterstock Elizabeth Warren says she wants to break up the Cloud Czars, saying that they're too powerful.All but one: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).Why not break up Microsoft, especially since it's now the most valuable company on the board, a market cap of over $900 billion, supporting 2018 revenues of $110 billion -- nearly one-third of which it turned into operating income?Maybe it's because Microsoft pays its taxes, including almost $20 billion worth last year. But it's also because Microsoft has already been visited by the antitrust police, 20 years ago. It paid dearly, losing its monopolies in PC operating systems and applications and then drifting for over a decade, held down by lawyers and fear.Satya Nadella relaunched Microsoft as a cloud player in 2014, though Microsoft's Azure cloud isn't a monopoly. Nothing Microsoft does is a monopoly any more. Sony (NYSE:SNE) bests it in gaming and its Edge browser and Bing search engine are considered also-rans.But Microsoft is competitive in every cloud niche, it has a dividend yielding 1.6%, its trailing price-to-earnings ratio sits at under 30 and its public profile is low enough to stay well away from regulators. It is once-burned, twice-shy -- a sadder but wiser cloud company. International Business Machines (IBM): Big Blue Lays it All on RedSource: Shutterstock International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) has bet its future on buying Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) for $34 billion and making itself into a private cloud play.Since the deal was announced in October, IBM shares are up 25%, well over the 16% gain of the Nasdaq. The shares are still cheap, sporting a P/E ratio of under 15 with a $1.57-per-share dividend paying a yield of 4.5%. Its market cap is just 1.5 times its sales, also cheap for a technology stock.IBM was late to the cloud party because its older businesses did not need the cloud to operate. Mainframes were sort of clouds before clouds existed, and IBM has monopolized that business for decades. But clouds are slowly sinking that business, and IBM was run out of its old niches in PCs and minicomputers by Chinese competition, eventually selling most of its hardware units to Lenovo (OTCMKTS:LNVGY).Instead, IBM sank its cash flow into the dividend. It bought a small cloud player called Softlayer, but wasn't big enough to compete in public cloud. The idea behind the Red Hat deal, as the press release on it stated, was to transform IBM into a "hybrid cloud" provider.The strategy is simple to describe. Red Hat software, including its Linux operating system and OpenShift (which lets companies put their own software into clouds as self-contained "containers"), will be offered by both Red Hat and IBM's existing programmers. Enterprises can replace their aging data centers with small clouds, then quickly scale customer services compatible with those internal systems on public clouds. * 7 Small-Cap Stocks That Make the Grade If the strategy works, the value of IBM stock could easily double from here within a year, as it becomes a premier cloud merchant. But there is a lot of competition. It's your cheapest speculation in the cloud. Palo Alto Networks (PANW): Securing the CloudPalo Alto Networks (NYSE:PANW) has gone from zero to $22.5 billion in market cap since 2005 on the back of cloud security.Originally a "next-generation firewall" company, providing security products to keep bad guys out of data centers, Palo Alto has spent over $1 billion on acquisitions in the last two years. Most recently it bought Demisto, an Israeli security company, for $560 million. Demisto is in the business of "orchestrating" or automatically organizing a company's security efforts using machine learning.All this has given Palo Alto a cloud-like valuation. That $22.8 billion market cap supports just $2.2 billion in fiscal 2018 revenue. It should grow to $2.5 billion in fiscal 2019, which ends in July. Fast growth means all that money goes back into the business. There are no profits. But operating cash flow has grown consistently and will blow past $1 billion this year.Palo Alto's move to cloud is transforming the revenue mix into monthly subscriptions instead of one-time payments, making it a favorite among analysts.The company is in a key niche, security, and leading with today's key customers, those with clouds. ServiceNow (NOW): Automating Workflows in the CloudServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) may be the biggest software company you've never heard of, thanks to the cloud.ServiceNow is in the business of automating workflows. Its cloud-based platform organizes the movement of information among employees and customers. It started within computer departments in 2004, and has since expanded into serving entire enterprises, both internally and externally. The concept is that "work is the killer app," and its latest update, dubbed Madrid, applies this to the mobile world as well as the desktop.Shares rose 43% over the last year, despite the tech wreck. More important, they're up almost 300% over the last five years. The $43.8 billion market cap is held up by $2.6 billion in 2018 revenue, up from $1.9 billion a year earlier. That's growth people will pay for, even absent profits, and the company came close to break-even last year, losing just $26 million.That computer workflow management piece of the company includes cloud management, making it a key competitor in the hybrid cloud world. It works with Microsoft but also Amazon's AWS and VMware (NASDAQ:VMW). * 15 Stocks That May Be Hurt by This Year's Big IPOs ServiceNow has 37 analysts following it now, 28 of whom give it buy ratings . It's expected to finally become profitable in 2019, to the tune of $3.10 per share. VMWare (VMW): Essential InfrastructureSource: Shutterstock In addition to commodity hardware, two key technologies were required to make the cloud work.First comes virtualization, a virtual operating system that runs on top of applications and lets them all run regardless of the operating system they're written for. Then comes distributed computing, in which jobs can run on part of one computer, on several, or on thousands at once.So before there could be clouds, there was VMware, serving up virtualization. In the last decade it was the more-profitable spin-off of EMC, and 80%-owned by that company, which makes large data storage systems. Today EMC and VMWare are part of Dell Technologies but its tracking stock still trades, and since its new parent went public at the end of 2018 it's up 33%.VMWare is a prize for analysts, investors and Michael Dell, who paid $67 billion for EMC (and its 80% stake in VMware) in 2015, because it is a lean, mean profit machine. Revenues have gone from $6 billion in fiscal 2017 to $8 billion in 2018 and to $9 billion for the 2019 fiscal year, ending Feb. 1, with net income rising to $2.4 billion last year. That means VMWare trading at "just" 8.5 times sales, which is considered affordable for the growth.For the world of hybrid cloud, VMWare now offers its own operating system, Cloud Foundation, which runs on EMC hardware . This lets companies easily connect their existing VMWare data centers to public clouds like Amazon's. It has also signed a partnership with Microsoft to converge their previously competitive hypervisors , the software that makes virtualization possible, bringing some of its customers to the Microsoft cloud.VMWare already is where IBM wants to be.Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of a new mystery thriller, The Reluctant Detective Finds Her Family, available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in MSFT, AAPL and AMZN. More From InvestorPlace * 2 Toxic Pot Stocks You Should Avoid * 7 Financial Stocks to Invest In Today * 7 Single-Digit P/E Stocks With Massive Upside * 5 Chip Stocks on the Rise Compare Brokers The post 5 Cloud Stocks to Help Your Portfolio Fly appeared first on InvestorPlace.
- Market Realist•8 hours ago
Gundlach Predicted the Fed’s 2018 Direction Change—What’s Next?
Why Jeffrey Gundlach Thinks We're Still in a Bear Market(Continued from Prior Part)Gundlach on the FedWhile it’s anybody’s guess now whether the Federal Reserve will proceed slowly in terms of interest rate hikes in 2019, the situation looked to
- American City Business Journals•9 hours ago
Want to scale your AI? Teach it ethics.
AI needs an education that goes beyond crunching limitless datasets for new insights, according to Accenture's AI lead.
- American City Business Journals•9 hours ago
Nashville health care CEO steps aside as part of restructuring
The move is part of a restructuring of the company’s operations that includes the elimination of two C-suite positions and the merging of Axial’s technology and product teams.
- CNBC•10 hours ago
Google announces Stadia streaming game platform in effort to upend the $140 billion game market
Google unveiled its Stadia game platform on Tuesday. Google will also sell a special Stadia controller. Google GOOGL on Tuesday announced its plans to upend the $140 billion gaming industry dominated by Sony 6758.T-JP and Microsoft MSFT with a new streaming service called Stadia that allows people to play high-end games without purchasing expensive consoles or computers.
- Zacks•10 hours ago
3 Cloud Stocks to Buy Right Now
"The Cloud" has evolved from a budding innovation in tech to one of the largest factors driving growth in the technology sector in only a few years. So check out these three Zacks buy-ranked cloud stocks to consider right now.
- Zacks•11 hours ago
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Microsoft, Facebook, Synopsys and Symantec
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Microsoft, Facebook, Synopsys and Symantec
- Investing.com•11 hours ago
Stocks - Dow Downed as Trade Talks Sour
Investing.com – The Dow fell Tuesday as gains in consumer discretionary stocks and expectations for the Federal Reserve to continue its pledge to keep rate hikes on hold were offset by reports of souring U.S.-China trade talks.
- Zacks•11 hours ago
What Will You Miss Out On by Overlooking Cadence Stock?
Cadence (CDNS) is benefiting from robust adoption of the company's digital and signoff, custom & analog and IP solutions.
