Ransome

Murdoch’s Bing Bluster Will Hurt News Corp, Not Google

Eventually Google will be spending more time on the secondary sites and blogs where one can find much superior information than the dis-information the WSJ puts out.

Why a Market Crash Doesn’t Matter

My concern is structural. Wall Street has increasingly been converting our money supply into financial products. The obfuscation of liquidity of these products and the stability of underlying values and associated risks is controlled by fewer and fewer hands and outside of the regulated money supply. This has been building for 40 years.

We have recently observed much of the under-belly of the shadow banking system enhanced by leverage, mis-calculated risk, and in some cases, intentional fraud. Liquidity of securities is a big issue along with complexity and interconnectedness. This has little to do with company value of a simple stock. There is no loyalty on Wall Street, they would eat each others' lunch. No one is going to ride the market down gracefully after regaining some profit. As an example, mutual funds are a vulnerable structure, let alone funds of funds of funds. It is a structure problem and a short term pricing problem. One supposes that HFT which ignore valuation, can exacerbate the hash of prices. To prevent a catastrophic crash, the flow of money needs to slow down for awhile. We need to seriously re-consider the value of all the different Frankenstein financial products that are replacing our money supply. On good days they may work, but on bad days there is trouble.

I read on another blog that the Administration seems to have pulled back on jobs and is focusing more on a consumer and business credit solution to recovery.

Microsoft: Whistling in the Dark

I would have liked to see numbers. Does MS loss equal Apple's gain? So there is more to the story. I think there are two things going on.

People don't care to change OS once something works, like XP. People are fed up with radically changing UI, they just want to use the tool to get the job done. Computers are no longer novel or an end in themselves. In the long run, most people just want their car to start every morning.

Hardware continues to become cheaper and as a result, people buy more of it. Computers are becoming the new multi-purpose calculators. Thirty-five years ago, a simple calculator cost the same as a netbook today. Paying $500 a pop for software for each unit is no longer viable. There is a lot of downward pressure on MS to reduce prices and to produce better quality outcomes with less frequent releases. MS has passed peak oil. They will downsize to meet demand, rather lack of demand. Cloud computing, if it takes off, will require the giving away of software and selling space. MS is now going give away Office online to see if it can become an ASP with a monthly fee. No one is going to pay a fee for each owned unit so there will be another revenue hit. There is nothing that Balmer can do, nor can anyone else.