Greentext

To invest billions is more difficult because high growths opportunities with high margins rarely exist in that price range.

Yes, you won't be able to multiply your money. But once you have millions or billions to spare, it's pretty easy to invest them in such a way that the returns will cover more than you spend on a daily basis at least. This easily develops a certain sense of carelessness.

Are they stupid or do they optimize for different constraints? MS could have introduced AI for surveillance and not for growth.

Ubisoft stock prices plummeted down and nearing the historical minimum.

Microsoft's trust in ai is akin walking a bridge across a chasm, while building the said bridge on the go. Considering that linux share actively grows in later years, they're doing a bad job with that bridge. EUs latest concerns about US and reliance on the US technologies don't help either.

The quality of their product also depleeted, thanks to the reliance on aformentioned ai hype train, and usage of inapropriate technologies to build their OS companents (i.e. using react native for the start menu). All of that tops of with dubious investments, be it OpenAI, or bying Activision a few years prior. Not even mentioning the smaller game studios like Tango Gameworks that they bought only to close off immediately. Everything listed can be summarized as poor management decisions.

You might argue that they're rich enough to spare a billion or two on such mistakes, but those mistaces appear to be systematic, rather than one-offs. To me it seems like a start of a slow and very painful fall.