![]() ![]() Twitter is up to 77 public repositories on GitHub.Įven traditional vendors appear to be hedging against potential long term declines in either revenues, margins or both from software licensing. Facebook built Cassandra to manage its Inbox, released it as open source software, and then replaced it with open source software originally written by a startup acquired by Microsoft. Android, the primary challenger to Apple’s iOS, is made available for free. Google’s publication of the Google FileSystem and MapReduce papers, for example, allowed an erstwhile competitor to build Hadoop. The next generation of large technology companies, meanwhile, not only have chosen not to sell software, they behave as if the software itself is of little economic value. Even allowing that this is due in large part to normal merger and acquisition patterns, in which large companies effectively outsource risk to startups, the fact is that the market has not generated a large technology vendor oriented around selling software in twenty-two years. ![]() The youngest of them was founded in 1989. ![]() The Top 20 firms that sell software, as measured by PwC, are, on average, 47 years old. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this is the case. Maybe it’s not just Microsoft, but the market around it? One possibility that is rarely discussed in this context, however, is that the value of software broadly is in decline. From the Innovator’s Dilemma to the misjudgement of the internet opportunity to questions about leadership, the cause of the company’s stagnation depends largely on who you ask. The stock’s general malaise has been attributed to different factors over the years. As I write this, a single share of MSFT can be had for $30.90. In the decade plus since, it has generally traded for approximately half that valuation. On December 24th, 1999 Microsoft was trading at $58.719 a share. ![]()
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