FredStein

Internet Advertising: Stopping Others from Christmas Evil

Thanks for the article. Google is NOT a search company. They have an Ad engine. There is NOW a market opportunity for a true search company. Google CANNOT change their business model to provide true search (search that is not highly skewed by ad revenue). If they forego the $B's of ad-skewed search, they collapse.

Intel: The Tech Giant that Keeps On Growing

Some much wrong info:

Intel does not have 80% of the computer chip market. It's actually 14% of the chip biz. But only counting computer chips, it's still much less than 80% if you count all the ARM (all cell phones), MIPS (most of Cisco's gear), SPARC, PowerPC, and IBM's mainframe chips. And in terms of units, ARM already beats AMD & Intel combined.

"Intels sales peaked a decade ago during the Dot COM"? No. Revenue peaked in '05. But revenue has been kinda flat since then. Ironically, the Intel/AMD architecture has grown well in the last decade. It displaced Sun in Internet infrastructre, PowerPC for the Mac, and reached down to Netbooks for a huge spread in price points.

All this begs the monopoly question. With all of Intel's aggressive (I'll leave legal issues to others) tactics, and with it's success in winning new customers such as Google & Apple (would they allow themselves to depend on a predatory monopolists?), why has Intel's top line growth been so anemic since 2005? I think the answer is simple: The computer biz (ditto games, TVs, communications) is under relentless pressure to grow, to relentless offer more for less each year. It's called Moore's law. If you don't follow it, you die. Or get acquired.

By the way, the leader in chip top line growth was Samsung.

SunPower: Accounting Mistakes Could Lead to Financial Restatement

This seems trivial but it is not. The gross margins are low, below 20%. That needs to improve. And it seems they don't measure cost accurately.

That said, they would be profitable even after corrections. Plus, they are growing despite the drop in fossil fuel prices.

EU Showdown over Oracle-Sun: Objections Seem Imminent

Do the EU regulators seriously suggest that ORCL would kill off or starve MySQL? Oracle bought innodb a while back. It is a good business and highly complementary. The market created by MySQL will not go away nor migrate to other Oracle databases, since alternatives exist and/or would be created by entrepreneurs and VCs.

What is the real issue for the EU regulators? I mean this as a serious question, and would love to hear insights.

With Yang Out, Microhoo Could Be Back On

At last an article on this topic that makes some sense, mainly that Yahoo is about aggregation and not search. And now it's affordable. MSFT can buy it with cash on hand and have money to spend rescuing its own shares.

If bought for cash, YHOO would increase MSFT EPS by $.40 / share, or about 9%.