Microsoft to Zoom: "You are not enough"
Hey Snackers,
After about a year, April is (finally) over. May the 1st be with you, and may the thirst be with these two guys who live in a London pub — locked down with free beer on tap, not too shabby.
US markets dipped on some sad economic data: over 3.8M Americans filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total of newly unemployed to 30M in just 6 weeks. Consumer spending dropped 7.5% in March, exceeding the previous record drop of 2.1% set in January 1987. Still, US stocks had their best month since 1987 — the S&P 500 gained almost 13% in April.
FYI, join our Instagram Live "Snacks Break" @ 4:30pm EST today — we're chatting corona-conomy takeaways, answering your questions, and may wear slammin' salmon head-to-toe — @RobinhoodSnacks
Congratulations, it's a profit!.. Tesla cutting its earnings reveal cake. The electric car icon made investors smile after posting its 3rd straight quarter of profitability (its longest streak ever), despite corona-related production disruptions like the shutdown of its key Shanghai and Bay Area factories. Tesla can thank a combo of cost cuts + sales bumps for that:
PR's having whiplash... Tesla's PR team barely had 5 minutes to bask in this post-earnings glow when Elon decided to leave no doubt about where he stands vis-a-vis lockdowns (this all happened mid-earnings call, btw). Spoiler: he hates them.
Two sides of the "end corona-conomy" debate... The more publicly touted, less media-stirring position is that current lockdowns are necessary until COVID-19 infection rates fall more. Facebook's Zuck is worried reopening too fast will lead to future outbreaks and worse health/economic consequences. Then there are biz leaders like Elon who believe the biggest threat is the actual effect of the locked down economy (rather than the virus). Zuck vs. Musk.
Don't call it soft... The world's most valuable publicly-traded company, Microsoft, just revealed extra strong quarterly earnings. Success in its high-flying cloud biz offset corona-related losses (like interruption of Surface laptop/tablet production). The OG software star seemed to barely feel any pandemic business pain at all. Au contraire...
Just crushed earnings, BRB... Have to go crush my rival now. Microsoft’s remote workplace tool, Teams, has been referred to as a less-sexy version of Slack. But Teams DGAFs because its daily users jumped 70% from 44M in mid-March to 75M today. On 1 day in April, a whopping 200M people were logged into Teams. And Teams' new enemy isn't Slack... it's Zoom:
"One & Only" companies have weaknesses... "One & Only" companies like Zoom do just 1 thing really well. But a "One & Many" company like Microsoft can offer better integration with its existing products (think Word/Excel/PowerPoint and a broader suite of services to scale. Unless a company is a just-born young startup, it's more likely to go with a familiar option like Microsoft long-term over Zoom's single-product.
🍪 Thanks for Snacking with us! Want to share the snacks? Invite your friends to sign up here.
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Tesla and Microsoft
ID: 1173023