MSFT faces a critical transition risk but offers a buying opportunity due to market doubt and low valuation multiples.

So before working with TIP, I actually used Canva kind of all the time to help make images for use on Twitter and Substack. And you know, it was super easy. was super intuitive and I didn't have to spend really any time trying to figure out how to use it.

It was just that easy. But I must admit, I haven't used Canva in years. And once I could use AI to generate images, I was less and less likely to use it over time. So yeah, there's often this kind of disconnect in the software world between products that engineers build and then what is actually most useful to customers.

And the vast majority of users, for example, they don't really need complicated software services to file taxes that know, you know, every single line of the tax code to a te. They just need something that's well intuitive, something that's basic and something that's good enough for 95% of the people out there.

Yeah, it's interesting that when you think that Wall Street runs on Excel spreadsheets, it seems like an opportunity that was clearly missed by Microsoft to turn that advantage into a broader total available market building out consumerfriendly accounting products.

Well, so in 1994, Microsoft tried to acquire into it outright for about $1.5 billion, which was an enormous price at the time, but the deal ultimately was abandoned over antitrust concerns.

So what does Microsoft do then? Well, they build a direct competitor called Microsoft Money and they come after QuickN with the full weight of the Windows operating system behind them and evidently into it not only survived but it won.

And one of the expressions internally at the time which there I was some truth to I believe was that quote Microsoft can't match our depth of consumer empathy. And Microsoft did eventually give up and discontinued Microsoft money after having built a product that was more complex than it needed to be.

It had fantastic engineering behind it because Microsoft had the best engineers, but it was not intuitive to the everyday user like Quick and Products were.

Microsoft is without a doubt still one of the highest mode businesses in the world, but I would still say that it's in a very critical transition phase that it has to nail. Now, >> you're not used to seeing the market doubt Microsoft the way it currently is.

Usually, this is one of the most stable Mag 7 companies out there. But that's also why it might be a rare opportunity to buy Microsoft at historically low multiples today. So, we did that with Google and it was our most successful investment last year.

And today, we will see if Microsoft can become our most successful investment this year.