Barry Brown

What Do Falling Profit Margins Say About the Market?

Very nice work!

Windows Vista: Not Exactly Selling Like Hotcakes at Amazon

Begs the question:

where did xp rank when it was rolled out?

If Amazon sales were not significant for xp then you wouldn't think that vista would change anything.

Microsoft vs. Google in Office Software: What's The End Game?

Many people believe that attempts to build complex, highly interactive applications with disparate browsers and an ill-defined 'standard' known as ajax will eventually hit a wall. Have you given Google's 'excel' a try? Does it seem a bit sluggish? Thats because the underlying technologies are interpretive (i.e. trade off efficiency for flexibilty).

Google's current development technology allows its programmers to develop in java with the results then 'decompiled' into a slower, web-compatible equivalent - in my book this is the exact opposite of what you would expect (develop in a flexible environment and deploy in an optimized one).

It sounds great to say that all of those win32 apps could some day run on a browser, but peel the onion a bit and perhaps you'll see that its a pipe dream.

Should Individual Investors Stop Picking Stocks?

This may be an oversimplification, but I have invested substantially in a mutual fund that has outperformed the SP500 by 1.65% over its life (since 1988) and 3.07% since I've owned it (1996). My thinking was that luck could not explain this phenomenon. So what is wrong with my approach: find a fund that consistenly outperforms its benchmark and invest in the fund instead of the benchmark.

Incidentally, the fund is Longleaf Partners and they have outperformed with low beta and low turnover (mostly LTCG).