Moon Kil Woong

Is It Game Over for the Gaming Industry?

The gaming industry is more and more like a burger shop swapping existing monsters and character wireframes and putting them in the same boring scenarios. No wonder people are moving to simple facebook games and free to play platforms.

Many of the new titles a group of college grads could produce on their spare time. That is a good thing for gamers but bad for people trying to make a hundred million off of your kids.

The Problem with iPhone Killers

Dead on analysis: Why go after a 6% of the market with a loyal following. Even so, the phone industry must adapt or die. If anyone MOT which once dominated this industry should know that. They have been laggards for decades. Perhaps they've seen the light.

Maybe it's NOK's time to get the spanking it deserves for refusing to change their OS. Clinging to the past in the mobile phone industry relegates you to the trash bin. I support MOT, Samsung, Apple, and Palm for trying to add some innovation to an increasingly stagnant mobile phone industry.

Motorola Looks Far Better than Other Mobile Internet Players

It was sad to watch Motorola loose its marketshare back 20 years ago and it will be equally sad for Nokia if it doesn't advance. Times are changing. Both of their handsets are laughably outdated. The only thing that keeps users using them is the fact it takes time for users to get used to actually using an easier menu system and the fact iPhone and the Prada phone were a bit pricey for most people.

Get with the program! Touchscreens and internet capable are neccesities to stay on the cutting edge of the market not added features.

Cramer's Stop Trading! How to Trade Apple Announcements (9/9/09)

Toffe, aww you're no fun. You're like the guy who explains the illusions a magician uses in a magic trick. No one watches cramer for his brilliance. We just want to watch him bounce around and put on silly hats and things.

The Case for Moving iTunes to the Cloud

External HD are the solution. You cab back up Terabytes now. In a few years at this rate it will be tens of terabytes. Technology is the only thing that improves your standard of living relative to inflation.

And there is nothing better than owning and having content yourself. If you don't they'll always be looking on how to deny you the content you already saw and how to monetize it yet again while sucking you dry.

Closing Update for Monday, August 3

This was all a dollar depreciation fueled global fund rebalancing story again. And the bonus was the whopping increase the US Treasury gets to pay on their US Treasury bonds. I'd like to be happy, but this clearly wasn't a rise based on fundamental strength again, rather it is based upon our glaring weakness.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Beige book numbers oh boy, a good chance to spin spun numbers. The only question is will people buy it. If they do you get a brief run, if not a nice fall even GS can't prop up. Whatever the case, volatility should move up as we move into another month of fun and close the book on a bizzaro low volume run up.

Bye Bye Apple

Decent responses Alex Filonov. Indeed things are a balance between risk and reward and Apple is quite rich. My quandry is only Google seems also a bit rich and overhyped as well. Wouldn't you be better off in a smaller high growth tech company?

As for Jobs, he seems good for a few more years although a bit less dynamic. I figure by that time competition in the high end cell phone market will be sizzling. there is still time to get out if your worry is Job's health.

The Implications of Russia's Declining U.S. Debt Purchases

The move to short term treasuries is fundamentally bearish for treasuries even if purchases by China rise. In addition, it puts upward pressure on interest rates and adds to the fundamental instability of US bonds since they need to be reauctioned in larger and larger tranches more often just to keep the financing flowing.

As for Russia, I think posters are right, they have their own problems to deal with and are insignificant in terms of US debt funding. I seriously doubt they have ulterior motives in shunning US debt since they have such a minor effect.

Microsoft Gets Its Edge Back

It would help if Microsoft actually spent time and money fighting it's #1 enemy, it's own blue screen of death. I know many testers trying out Microsoft's new OS and they keep coming up with the same problems as Vista, although it is impossible to beat Vista in terms of an absolute failure.

Rather than watching Microsoft fight others, the bigger issue is if anyone will ever be able to take Microsoft on in its own cash cow, Office. There are certainly many improvements that can be made, especially on the retarded version they made for Apple. The same reason Microsoft needs to deflate Google's cash cow is the same reason sooner or later Google needs to at least put up a decent proposition against Office. Since they are serious about making the seach more like an OS I'm sure they are in development of such an application.

Even though Microsoft ad wise may look more lively and on the offensive, I would tend to side with those that believe that Microsoft has been on the defensive. They are loosing the portable device and music platform, the high end PC market, the search wars, and Linux has spread like wildfire among corporate servers. Their only real victory is perhaps the demise of Sun which was more due to their own failures than that of Microsoft.

Even though I think Microsoft will do fine in the next cycle since I and everyone else in the world can't wait to get rid of Vista (meaning i must upgrade to their new OS) it's a far cry from saying Microsoft has it's edge back. Microsoft has no mojo. It just has a giant pocketbook and a monopoly that hopefully will become obsolete one of these days. They don't encourage technological advancement, they stymie it. May the digital world belong to the innovators.

Bonds Signal Fed Should Start Raising Rates Soon

As we learned with Greenspan should is not will. In fact, politically they pretty much never do until inflation is already well underway. Thus the fed's predictions they will keep Zirp rates until 2010 is probably quite accurate.

Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft. And It's Made of Chrome.

Microsoft makes boatloads off of it's office which is ancient and not that good. There just isn't much of a choice after people allowed it to monopolize that space. I look forward to when Google or anyone else spawns a Office solution to force Microsoft to actually spend money improving it rather than acting like 1980's software is still good enough for the modern age. When they do look for the end of Windows.

Businesses buy Windows for the office applications, not for anything else. Without them Microsoft can kiss its market goodbye. No one really is endeared to its products whatsoever. We use them because businesses use them. That's all.

Should Starbucks Have Been More Cost Conscious During the Boom?

Start bucks could help itself by spending more time improving their coffee as well. After trying to lower cost by buying its own plantations they can no longer pick the best beans to use. This has made their coffee rate lower than McDonalds. I don't mind paying some for ambience but really, even lower cost rent won't save you from a deviation from your "percieved" core competency.

I think Michael Steinberg hit on the fact that Starbucks was a hypergrowth scheme reliant on cult marketing and prestige branding and raising prices. In fact, their strategy reminds me a lot like Mrs. Field's cookies that crumbled except I can say their cookies were a lot better than Starbuck's coffee ever was.

Palm: Execution Is Everything

I thought everyone was wating for google's mobile OS architecture? It's way too soon to say their OS will dominate for the next 10 years. For now they will be lucky just to keep up with Palm (dominates the consumer snazzy app market) and Blackberry (dominates the business app market).

As for Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Ericcson: get your act together and come up with something. I hope the three just mentioned above their lunch. Nokia has been depending on their 10 year old OS and their hopes customers won't want to switch from their archaic menu system for far too long. Their lazy attitude is much the same as Motorola who did the same thing in the early 90s and lost all their marketshare because of it.

When Anonymous Sources Disappear Entirely

What would the market do without speculation an innuendo? Probably drop dead for lack of tradable baloney to throw around.

I agree with Felix salmon that I respect papers stating unblemished facts. However, due to the past years on the assault on journalism for posting facts and for protecting their sources, I certainly think that we should give more difference to real journalism trying to uncover and expose what's going on rather than less.

The media seems to be the only real check on the government and even then it is subject to the whims of politics and biased fancy. Oh what is the world coming to?

Today I value blogger news over any of the mainstream media. It seems that people in the know tend to be, more often than not, some guy in the blogosphere who actually did their research.