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Microsoft CFO calls for 'intensity' in an internal memo, after blowout earnings
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Publicly traded companies have to continually make more money than they did last month, last quarter, same time last year.
Failing to do so means they are somehow "losing" money that is "rightfully owed" to them and the stock market punishes them.
It doesn't matter if you're profitable or not, so long as you're continually making more money.
It's not only "more". The company I work for had "record profits, far and beyond anything we were expecting" in 2021. In 2022, we were told that the company made more than in 2021, but didn't meet the earnings projections. That's still record profits, but phrased like a loss.
Not only must the line go up, but it has to go up faster than it did before. Nothing less than exponential growth.
It's supposed to be growth related to the things which didn't progress, so to say. So it's not literally supposed to be growth of processes, just that stagnation makes things diminish in value, and compared to them things more alive "grow". Something like that.
Kinda like inflation. And that's fine, that can describe a pretty sustainable society, it's not about consuming more and more, it's like rotation.
Except with today's oligopolies there's a different idea, that they really have to grow as in capturing more and more of humanity's resources. The AI bubble (or not) is their most recent approach to that.
That's because expectations were shaped by the 90s when many things exploded (unfortunately much of that were countries, also landmines and other expendable means of destruction).
In the 00s it was possible to create illusion of that explosion still going on brighter and brighter, despite just continuing what started in the 90s, and then to create a few large-scale scams (or madness pandemics, or tech fashions, whatever ; point is they weren't the same as years 1993-1999) with iPhones, new Apple in general, Google, Facebook, Twitter.
I'm not saying it was fake or worthless, it was a revolution too, but not what companies try to show since the dotcom bubble.
So - they are still trying to show that, with kinda rough, generic, and insincere effort, a bit like sex workers in their makeup.
And they can't show that without such expansion in width, not in height.
They actually have a legal obligation to maximize profits. It's insane.
It goes a layer further than that even. If the rate at which that growth is happening isn't itself growing then investors start getting nervous.
Yeah, except for Tesla, how the fuck man.
Mmhmm compare that with the sales numbers, then compare against any company in history which has had a similar sales pattern for a publicly traded company.