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Bing Tries to Buy the News

The last three paragraphs are truisms - the rest of the article is junk.

>> Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head... <<

I wasn't aware that google is a tiny company dependent on Murdoch to survive.

>> If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times the Washington Post, and the LA Times <<

That's a big "somehow". I liked how you explained how it could happen.

- F. Murray Rumpelstiltskin

Bing Tries to Buy the News

sdsdaf

Motorola Hitches Its Wagon to a Star

"Gmail and Apps are only so-so" .. does the writer even know what he

Is Anyone Using Chrome?

I can't use Chrome for two reasons:

1) No right-click, View/Selection Source, which is extremely handy for looking at HTML
2) The "Find Text" functionality doesn't look inside "textarea"s

For a reputed "developer's browser", these are major omissions.

Why 'GooBay' Makes Sense

I'd like to agree and I will. Not being the typical eBay story commentor (a disgruntled eBay/PayPal user with too much time on their hands and probably with very little, if any, shares of eBay stock owned), I may be able to shed a different perspective from the folks above.

Sure, eBay is a maturing company just as Google is starting to do. However, eBay is still a cash cow. Each of eBay's additional (hot) properties (PayPal, Skype, StubHub, and slowly but surely Kijiji) are worth a decent chunk of change on their own and are leaders in their fields. Not to mention that eBay is extremely cheap at this point in time.

Skype would fill Google's need for communication that they have been toying around with in different forms. PayPal would give them the payment facilities they have also been desperately seeking. Kijiji and the 25% stake in Craigslist would given them a rounded out ecommerce complement to what eBay and StubHub bring. All this while accumulating all the data behind these sites, like Google likes to do and claim ("manage the world's data"). Google will then twist it in different ways to squeeze out new products, services, and advertising revenue.

The savings eBay would enjoy, if owned by Google, in terms of advertising in search results would help save on eBay's costs as well as allow more search result penetration like back in the days when pretty much any search term on Google resulted in an eBay result (even if it made no sense "Find 'wine stains' on eBay").

I just don't know how Google could manage such a gigantic endeavor.

At its current price, this makes mostly sense. If eBay ever gets back up in the 20s, I don't think it would make as much sense.

eBay or Amazon would definately benefit from better integration with search engine results since both of their internal search mechanisms are lacking even though they have improved as of late.

Dividend Paying Stocks: You Only Have to Be Lucky Once

Devin, have you heard of the investment strategy called value investing ? It is obvious why CSCO's stock price didn't increase much during the past ten years and you point it out yourself: it was overvalued in 1999 (P/E == 100 !). It just took 10 years for the market to eventually correct that overvaluation. I personally believe that, as of today, $100B is a fair value for the company (therefore it *still* isn't a good buy because according the strategy you should invest in undervalued companies, not fairly valued ones). My background is IT/CS/Networking, and yes I did research CSCO :-)

Conversely, I haven't looked at PG, but I bet if you looked at their fundamentals you would notice they were *not* overvalued to begin with, so it was logical for their market cap to keep increasing because it is growing.

I also don't think that investing is a matter of luck. At a conference in the 1990s, Warren Buffett refuted that argument by showing data that him and a group of friends following this strategy were able to consistently outperform the market, every year, for a period of 20+ years, with differences in their portfolios.

I should say that even though I have probably less experience than most people here, my first exposure to investment strategies has been value investing, and it strikes me as so obvious that this is the right way to invest that I wonder why not more people follow it.