I can understand why the sentiment here is to say that Microsoft are foolish or shortsighted etc, however I don't quite subscribe to this opinion myself.
One must be careful of an echo chamber when everyone in a community is pro crypto and aware of it's benefits etc..
Microsoft are a 3 Trillion dollar Market Cap mammoth with fingers in many many pies. A Bitcoin strategy like Microstrategy is easy enough for an entity with a market cap of $300,000 which I believe is what they had before pumping to it's current valuation of 88 million dollars.
$300,000 ---- not much to lose or risk
$3,000,000,000,000 ----- quite a bit to lose or risk
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro Bitcoin and am confident that it will do well longterm, but the truth is it is an extremely volatile investment vehicle and volatility is not something you want if you are a large share holder in a 3 Trillion dollar market cap giant software company.
Just my tuppence worth, in the interest of balance.
I do accept most of what @geekgirl says about Microsoft and their ineptitude however, but I can understand their hesitancy here.
Amazon and Jeff Bezos on the other hand are disrupters and I would not be surprised if they adopt some sort of Bitcoin strategy, but to be honest I'd be very surprised if Jeff and co don't already have digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Cardano on their balance sheets.
I'm very bullish on these four especially and they will last the test of time, unlike meme coins and 99% of all other waste coins that will fall away to almost nothing...
Actually it is more difficult for smaller cap companies to do something like this, because their operations require all the capital they can get. MicroStrategy was in a good position because they didn’t need more money for core business operations and had to figure out how to preserve the value of half a billion in their treasury.
For Microsoft to invest a few billions in bitcoin wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t even be noticeable. Just another R&D expense. However, they would start participating in the technology.
They will surely regret this decision just like many other bad decisions they have made over the years.
That said, I think shareholders of big companies will keep voting against bitcoin, because if big companies start getting involved there won’t be many left at desired prices for them to buy.
For example, Blackrock probably prefers to have more bitcoins under their management, rather than Microsoft or Amazon, although Blackrock is invested in most big companies.