Today Microsoft shareholders voted down the proposal for the company to invest in bitcoin. When it was reported Microsoft shareholders were going to vote on bitcoin strategy last month, it was a welcome news for many in crypto world. This seemed like an no-brainer move for a company like Microsoft. Unfortunately, shareholders decided to side with the board and rejected the bitcoin strategy. This was expected outcome. Not because bitcoin strategy is not a good fit the the company business, but because Microsoft is known for making big mistakes when it comes to new technologies. The story of the Microsoft is an interesting one. It has many instances of massive success, but also display obvious business decision blunders. In my opinion, Microsoft has made another blunder with rejecting bitcoin strategy. We will most likely see them playing a catching up gain in the future, as they have done many times in the past.
Microsoft have established itself as a global technology company that have contributed a lot into the advancements in computers and technology. However, much of their success relies on what have been built in the past. Windows, MS Office software, Azure cloud are very old technologies. While their use is still widespread, they don't do a good job of innovating these products either. Their ability to establish relationships with companies around the world made it possible to retain their market share even with not so impressive improvements and innovations. Another reason is the IT specialists that work for many companies have been trained in these technologies and often find it difficult to change to different one. Success is a success. They have done well here. However, there are many failures as well and most are due to inability of the company leadership to recognize the technological innovation and trends.
Among major failures in Microsoft's business decisions history is their ability to gain market share in digital music, digital products, web search, social media, online ads, mobile devices, and many more. Remember Bing? Does anybody use Bing today? When MS realized they missed their opportunity with search engine, they went big with Bing and spends tens of billions to make it relevant. They even made a deal with Yahoo. Both failed. It is not like they didn't see the importance of the internet, search, and knowledge base. This was too obvious and clear for them. Their leadership have spoken how next big thing was the internet before internet was the big thing. They had software in works. They were in the right path. But they couldn't really see what search was and how to achieve it. Remember MS Zune? Only after they saw how Apple was innovating with digital music and digital products and devices, MS decided to get in. Again after billions of dollars wasted on the project it was cancelled. Their journey to gain any market share with mobile tech was probably the most embracing ones. First they laughed at iPhone and Apple, then they decided to join, spent tens of billions, partnered with Nokia, and failed again. Any Microsoft mobile phones today? There are many stories like this where Microsoft failed big time when they could be a significant players in any of these markets. Lack of vision, arrogance, and inability to innovate resulted in MS becoming irrelevant in these spaces.
I believe bitcoin is another big space where Microsoft had an opportunity to participate early on and make the best of it. However, once again lack of vision, arrogance and inability to embrace the innovation prevented them taking this path at this time. There will come a time when MS will reconsider their position, but it may just be too lake. They will play a catch up again, but won't result in any significant benefits for the company. Of course, bitcoin strategy is different than being part of creating new products, new technologies that they can control. Perhaps that's why they have chosen not to embrace it. Being a decentralized technology, could have actually produce more benefits for Microsoft. While the bitcoin investment proposal was mainly about buying bitcoin with 1-5% profits, I see much more benefits beyond treasury and investments. There is no doubt their treasury could benefit with long term investment in bitcoin. 5% could serves as hedge against inflation, anything more could help to position the value of their assets at much higher values in the future that they could spend in many more interesting innovations. Shareholders would see nice returns on their investments, but also the company would be more competitive in the innovation space. But the most important thing I believe Microsoft could benefit from is in bitcoin as a technology. Having decent amount in their custody and developing solutions in this space would keep the company relevant in crypto space. Many tech companies are missing out at this time, but a winner will emerge. Then it will be too late.
Microsoft had different leadership since Bill Gates stopped actively running the company. Steve Ballmer would try to gain market share in everything, but would come in too late. Many examples above are failures under Ballmer's leadership. Satya Nadella have made some changes that brought a little bit more focus for the company. Instead of being spread out focusing many different areas, Nadella cancelled many projects and made it company's main focus to dedicate resources on things that have been working. For example, emphasis on cloud computing and advancements in Azure technologies have played a big role in recent success. Especially with the deal the have made with openAI put them in a good position with AI technologies. It is a shame how they couldn't be pioneers in AI themselves as one of the biggest software company with tons of money and developer resources. They did the next big thing, continued building the infrastructure needed for developing AI technologies, and made good deals with right players. But that is about it. There is much more Microsoft can brag about as recent innovations. After multiple iterations of Windows updates they seem to got something stable out now. Even that is not much of an innovation, but rather correcting the previously made mistakes.
With all what Microsoft have done, with all the leadership they have had, Microsoft is not a good company. It is not people's company. They don't built products to enable people to create. Apple does that. Microsoft always have focused on how much money they can get out of everything they do, while retaining monopoly, while retaining control over all the products the release. They aren't the greatest company in the world. A lot of things seems too phony and fake about what they are and what they do. Bitcoin could also have been a first step in rebuilding their reputation, and the vision. This could also be seen as joining people's movement towards transparency, better money, beneficial tech. Not today.
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.
From MicroStrategy to Microsoft was too big a leap. I bet the next corporation to adopt a Bitcoin treasury will be a boring low-tech company with a dominant owner-CEO. Not a cult leader like Saylor, but a moderate libertarian who'll want to hedge against inflation by putting 10% of their reserves in Bitcoin.
For high-tech companies, the challenge is that there's no leading cryptocurrency they could use to develop financial solutions. Bitcoin doesn't have the capacity for payments, Solana can't be considered reliable until they go two years without an outage (last one was in February 2024), and Ethereum tokens have a fundamentally insecure design. Other coins don't have the market cap and dev talent to be taken seriously by major players.
Litecoin is another option.
Great write up. I read earlier on Cointelegraph that there's a proposal for Amazon to start adding BTC to their balance sheets like MicroStrategy. Things are really escalating.
Microsoft would have been great though. I would have to think, once these companies get invested, there's nothing to stop them from incorporating the tech into their platforms. Once that happens, forget about it, we're mainstream if not already! Still, I'd like to see more real world usecase for crypto in general.
Shared to my Bluesky account.
It looks like the same people who submitted the proposal to Microsoft did the same for Amazon. Most likely the outcome will be similar.
It would be something though. IDK, it's just a matter of time now. We have countries adding crypto to their reserves, and MicroStrategy is the envy of Wall St. Seems like the floodgates are getting ready to open. At least they're having the conversation now.
glad they did. should probably reduce their cash holdings by paying dividends
Of course you are. I will remind you when they start the catching up game.
it will be a sad day :(
No, it will be an “I told you so” day.
A big company but not much innovation. Still they are worth trillions !
I am sad to hear that Microsoft shareholders are not willing to invest in Bitcoin. If they had decided to invest in Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin would have increased a lot. Let's see what happens to Bitcoin now.
As they wish, they will miss the train eventually.
Well. Everything else would have been a sensation. 🤷🏼♂️
Why will Microsoft reject the Bitcoin strategy? Can't they see the handwriting on the wall? I would have thought that observing the trend of events with Bitcoin adoption, Microsoft would have follow that trend.
Corporations and there share holders never seize to amaze me. I see the same share holders changing their minds and complaining why the company is missing out on potential gains this very bull run.
Be prepared to hear. Not having a BTC strategy does not mean we can not buy and hold BTC on our balance sheet, transparency has not been the best for the big companies.
Well atleast they will always have the capacity to buy at whatever price BTC will be at. The only problem is they will not have the bags in the same way as they would have had if they bought now.
It is not nice to get a negative result from the vote. However, this did not bring the BTC price down. I wonder if this was the reason for the drop the other day. Was there information that it would be negative before?
Ouch, a positive outcome would have pumped all crypto world... But yes I agree, Microsoft often makes bad decisions and for sure it's a bully and not good company
I would have thought that company like Microsoft would be the leading ones in adopting crypto assets being an organization which is technological rooted. Maybe the adoption will come later.
I felt bad about them voting down the proposal
Anyone who doesn’t invest in BTC has missed something huge
No doubt!
I'm sort of glad Microsoft arn't investing in bitcoin.
I don't want the lion's share of the 21 million bitcoins to be held by large corporations. I want them to be held by little people so we can use it as a hedge against fiat currency and a hedge against bad govts.
It sucks to hear that it failed. It's just a part of life but I still think that most of the largest shareholders are the people with the old way of finance. I don't think that they believe in crypto or BTC as much as we would.
Am quite curious and would have loved to hear the reasons why, this proposal was declined, sad life does not work that way and we can only speculate.
One of them was bitcoin is too volatile.
Business politics at play. However, we should celebrate this moment. And those already in the market, but saying there is not much upside to BTC should know that it still has a huge upside as these companies that are declining start coming into the market to fill up our bags the more. #Bullish
Funny thing is that someone had to protect their dividend payment at the expense of their future
Decisions decisions decisions!! This is one of those decisions that comes to bite you in the back side after a while. I am impressed with the people’s ability not to be moved by stories of gains being made by people who have invested in BTC
Congratulations to every crypto investor, clearly this ship has not yet taken off. Beautiful right up.
They cannot stop the future !BBH !LOLZ
Microsoft needs to swallow its pride. Sometimes it’s not the ability to make decisions that deter corporations. It’s the desire to be first and feel superior than others, that causes such.
With all the humorous eanergy. I feel sorry( pitty) for these poor, rich men.
Signals like these brighten my day. From this one thing I deduce is that we are earlier and nothing is as bullish as that. Hahaha, funny how a well endowed business with all the brilliant minds and advisers still makes such mistakes.
Interesting article. Peace be upon us all
@geekgirl! @day1001 likes your content! so I just sent 1 BBH to your account on behalf of @day1001. (16/20)
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