I would, when they announce their intentions regarding the share buyback. There is tonnes of cheap debt out there and companies are issuing buybacks for stock, because they can get the money to do so cheaply. Microsoft has not added any new news for this, and that has me laser-focused on this - and not even CES was the right climate for them to talk about their intentions for the company. They do buy stock back, just, nothing concrete about how much and when, apart from what they have done as intended over the last few years. 2021 has given them, as a market leader; the chance to show people where the focus is for the next 12-36 months...and with all this cheap cash swashing about and them being mute, you gotta take note. Why? Why not get some cash and buyback the stock; and thereby raise its value?
That's the mechanism of the thing, but I think they do it for same reasons other companies do, their competition increases, Apple, Android, Linux, ARM machines, everyone wants to cut into x86 OS share. MS is still heavily dependent on Windows users to use its other stuff. Even few years ago it was not an issue but right now it is, or at least they were still bidding on Windows Mobile Nokias and Surface tablets. They don't really have anything new so they are buying stock back. But then again I am only speculating here, I haven't really been paying attention to the problems at MS.
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar19/index.html If you ALT+F that web page, you can run searches for things like 'Visual Studio' or 'Bing' or 'Windows'. Windows is the interesting one, that will show Windows made $18,593,000,000 in 2017 and, $20,395,000,000 in 2019. The value of Windows (from 3rd parties) is very strong. You know that search engine 'Bing' ? Yeah, that made $7,628,000,000 (search for 'search advertising' as a keyword) The big one is 'Server products and cloud services' as that brought in a whopping $32,622,000,000 They have to buy stock back - this level of cheap cash will not last forever, and other companies are pushing the buy-back of issued stock - and I do not think MS will continue to give us mere mortal that kind of return on the shares for much longer. Buying the stock back will be the best thing they could do.
