Morning Editor’s Note: Apps For Everyone And IPOs For No One
tl;dr: It is early.
Good morning, fellow nerds. It’s coffee time here on the West Coast, but don’t worry about an empty pot. Your developers are probably just now arriving at the office to discover that they left their good headphones at home. It’s fine.
Today we’re looking at few things, including recent IPO performance and Microsoft’s new App Deluge. You might need a bit more caffeine, but we’re going to make progress together, I promise.
Microsoft Confusingly Does Many Things
The very public PR woes of Windows 10’s upgrade schedule aside, Microsoft has recently been on something of a roll, releasing a number of new applications to the public. The cadence is worth noticing. A sampling of headlines from the past two days or so:
- Microsoft expands GigJam preview to everyone [VentureBeat]
- Microsoft’s Sprightly app lets you create professional designs from your smartphone [TechCrunch]
- Microsoft launches Planner, a project-management tool part of Office 365 [VentureBeat]
And that’s in addition to the company making a direct venture investment, and bolstering its support for open source technology inside the same timeframe. [Meta Editor’s Note: Regarding Windows 10, Microsoft has taken fire for consumer-facing tactics that have been at times judged as overly aggressive.]
Update: According to Microsoft’s external PR crew, the company has in fact made three direct investments so far, through its reincarnated Ventures arm, including the afore-linked Helpshift. The others are CrowdFlower and Comfy.
IPO Redux, Redux
Long-time Mattermark readers will have endured probably too many posts and notes on the 2015 IPO crop in 2016. The companies that went public last year had to do until 2016 actually managed a few offerings of its own. We’re now there, to some extent.
To refresh you, we need to stare at four companies — two that are private, and two that are freshly public. The first two, our public firms, are Acacia Communications and SecureWorks which, as you most certainly recall, are our two United States-based technology IPOs so far this year.
Let’s check in on how they are performing so far compared to their offer price:
- Acacia Communications’ offer price: $23. Current price: $38.70. Percent change: +68.3.
- SecureWorks’ offer price: $14. Current price: $13.45. Percent change: -3.9.
I would make some sort of millennial emoji-based joke here involving chart glyphs, but I use real computers at work and thus have no idea how to execute that process on OS X. If you are a #teen, feel free to send me a tweet or email.
The above results show one very strong success, and one company that appears flat, until you recall that its initial pricing was weak. So, it’s really one success and one failure. That puts pressure on our two private companies — startups, I suppose, but too large in my books for me to use that term in good conscience without some sort of note like this to express my displeasure — Nutanix and Twilio, to perform on their own merits. It doesn’t seem like there is much of a wave, in either direction, at play in the public markets that will change IPO dynamics from their current state in the short-term, barring unexpected Nasdaq movement.
Once we have a few more 2016 tech IPOs in the bag, I’ll start doing direct performance comparisons to the 2015 class, but for today, just keep in mind that there are at least a few kids waiting in the wings rehearsing their lines under their breath.
The Stock Market
As promised to Nick Frost, I give you the stock market report: Nothing has happened thus far today, so there is no reason to check your 401(k), unless you want to calculate how lovely it will be to retire in 2287.
Today’s requirements: A listen of this song, and at least one double iced espresso. Go!
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