M-P

Thinking About the Cloud, Oracle and Salesforce.com

The Oracle move would be interesting ... or there is consolidation in the SaaS industry w/ SFDC leading the charge ... it could hurt parts of their ecosystem, but think of Siebel grabbing a number of complementary horizontals in Scopus, etc. They must spread the considerable SG&A over more of a footprint ... SFDC is already going for lock-in via intra/ternet, KM, social, etc. They will become harder to extract out. The platform is also a considerable force - no pun intended - and the idea of co-existing w/ on-prem makes sense on the enterprise side - for now. The SMB world could go mostly cloud - look at Appirio w/ the serverless enterprise - but that is their world. Practice what you preach.

With a King's Ransom in Cash, Why Still No Buying Spree in the Tech Space?

Most of the companies mentioned have traditionally sat on a lot of cash. Given the current economy, they may be able to get some incredible deals on the auction block or some sort of asset sale. The more margin of safety - the better. Also, as others have pointed out, why buy now when the price is likely to go down. I could also see some of the firms buying some net operating losses (NOLs) to springboard their future profits. Software is a tough game - fast moving and first copy costs are significant.

Running Strong Again: The Four Horsemen of Technology

We all know about the periodic table of returns ... sectors and industries rotate up and down the stack. However, we also know the data about chasing returns and mean reversion. I think we need to look at slices within certain industries - healthcare technology, bread-and-butter banking, greentech, etc.

Netbook Sales: Cannibalizing Notebooks or Incremental?

Per the comments, for the ordinary person - not the business or home power user - a netbook is more than sufficient. I think it will cannibalize for some segments and not others. Frankly, notebooks have come down in price a bit (esp. lower end) so I don't see a major price distinction on the hardware side - the software, on the other hand - thinking MSFT - has not come down that much unless you have a way to buy it at a discount. I understand why there is so much pirating of software in some countries. Software cost / Median Income = Large %.