reinharden

Internet Still Offers Abnormal Positive Returns

AOL isn't *really* an Internet company. It's original value was that it aggregated a bunch of dial-up customers into a proprietary walled garden. Eventually it opened the garden gates so that those customers could make it to the Internet.

AOL looked to partner with media companies because it knew it wasn't a media company and thought it needed to become one to grow/sustain the business.

Unfortunately, AOL and TW never really combined forces after the "merger". And AOL became increasingly less relevant as it was unable to hold on to its dial-up customer-base as cable and DSL and FioS all came along to take their customers away.

Now AOL is really just a bombed out shell of a company that doesn't know what it is...


What really is an Internet company?

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et al, at the end of the day, are simply websites with some users. It's not clear that they've any particular intellectual property providing a moat around their businesses.

CSCO and GOOG are definitely Internet companies. Without the Internet, they don't exist.

Yahoo! isn't sure what it is (it was almost a media company). MSFT wants to be an Internet company, but they're not sure what that means. AAPL is maybe on the verge of becoming something as yet unnamed (but who knows how that'll turn out).

reinharden

Why 'Bing'? Why Not 'Sift'?

Or at least that's what "googol" meant...

reinharden

On May 29 03:42 PM Larrysyr wrote:
> At least "google" meant the number represented by 1 followed by a
> hundred zeroes (inconceivably large before the recent bailouts).
> Naming the search engine "Google" implied you could find any piece
> of information you want in the huge chaos of the internet.

Web Browser Wars: Google Looking Beyond Market Share

You left a few important points out.

1) Chrome and Firefox are indeed open source; however, Chrome is built upon WebKit which is an open source tool strongly supported by Apple (it's the basis of Safari on the iPhone and under MacOS X). Assuming that all of Chrome is maintained in the open source arena, Apple will benefit relatively quickly. As Firefox doesn't use this software, their benefit will be less direct and immediate.

2) Chrome is designed to slide right into Android. So Chrome is Google's Mobile web browser (akin to Apple's Safari on the iPhone). Obviously Apple wasn't likely to do something so potentially competitive with the iPhone and Google would be nowhere with a PhoneOS without a web browser.

3) Google's line of web applications (Google Documents, gMail, Google Reader, etc) are currently hobbled by the absence of some key features in the web browsers. By providing an open source web browser that is optimized for enabling these web applications, Google is better able to compete with Microsoft's (and Apple's) more desktop centric application suite.

In the final analysis, short of buying Opera, Google really had little choice but to develop their own web browser.

reinharden

Why Is Google Entering the Browser Market?

It's true that Google has been supplying much of Mozilla's funding though Firefox; however, it makes little sense for Google to "acquire" Mozilla the company. What would they actually be buying? The Firefox "product" is open source (and Google has already paid for it a thousand times over).

And if Firefox / Mozilla / Netscape remnants were more useful, Google would have used that as the base of Chrome rather than the more Apple-based WebKit. And with Apple and now Google pouring resources into WebKit-based products for Windows, I suspect that Chrome and Safari will happily co-exist on Windows for at least a while longer.

reinharden

Google Mobile: Winners and Losers

Let's not forget Symbian (and by extension the owners of Symbian).
04.5% - Samsung
08.4% - Siemens
10.5% - Panasonic
13.1% - Sony Ericsson
15.6% - Ericsson
47.9% - Nokia
Their investments in Symbian have arguably decreased in value due to the gPhone consortia.

UIQ and the various companies that invested in UIQ similarly are definitely square in the sights of the gPhone.


There's no doubt that Windows Mobile / Windows CE / whatever the other Windows-based phone OS's are are losers in the sense that they'll be negatively impacted. But it's definitely not clear whether or not they're losers in the sense that they've lost. So I agree that this has yet to be determined.

reinharden

Five Reasons Intel May Weaken Microsoft

Malkiel, Apple learned back in the days of AIM that they don't want to be in the processor design business. And things are even worse now than they were then. A fab costs a fortune and you need to crank tens to hundreds of millions of parts through it annually to amortize the cost.

Far better to find a commodity part that works no worse than that of your competitors. Right now, AMD doesn't even bring that to the table since, at the moment, AMD's performance/dollar and performance/watt as well as top end performance all (at least arguably) fall short of Intel's.

Unless AMD does something relatively soon, they're getting down to the last generation of fabs that they can afford. AMD is slowly moving to 65 nanometers while INTC is moving on to 45 nanometers. That means that in terms of square millimeters that INTC marginal cost of goods sold will be about half of AMD's. And, at the moment, INTC can charge more for their products because they can outperform AMD's products.

So, unless you're a turnaround artist with deep pockets, now isn't the time to buy AMD.

reinharden

Microsoft Hits Multi-Year High: What's It Really Worth?

Why $9B in cash?

Didn't MSFT have $28B when they last shared that information?

Also, how do you, or should you even try to, take into consideration MSFT's planned $36B stock buyback?

reinharden

Apple's $7 Billion Christmas Quarter To Be Paced by iPod Sales

Hmm...I could have sworn at the time that I was looking at the right quarter, but I apparently mixed and matched from two different quarterly reports. Too many tabs open at the same time. :-(

But, in this instance, I'm more than happy to be demonstrated wrong.

reinharden

Apple's $7 Billion Christmas Quarter To Be Paced by iPod Sales

To yield 3.3 billion in revenue on 20 million iPod sales, the average sale price has to come in at $165. Last quarter, without the new $79 iPod Shuffle shipping, the ASP looks to have been a touch under $124. Wouldn't you expect the ASP to actually come down rather than bounce up some 33% as you're seemingly forecasting?

In perhaps an even simpler back of the envelope calculation: last quarter Apple shipped 14 million iPods for $1.74 billion in revenue. At 20 million for $3.3 billion you're almost calling for them to double their revenue on an increase of only 50%.

I'd be thrilled if Apple achieved those goals...but at last quarter's ASP, they'd have to ship nearly 27 million iPods to do so.

reinharden