Monthly Archives: February 2012

A Microsoft Rant

OK – in the last few weeks I have spent countless developer hours dealing with workarounds to the Microsoft security features that prevent my clients from using Microsoft software effectively.  Here is a great example. I had a request from a client to eliminate this message when they try to export a web page to an excel document via a tool I created:

message from Excel

So a little googling brings up this article to explain the problem:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsofficedeveloper/archive/2008/03/11/excel-2007-extension-warning.aspx.

My favorite line in this document is “If the user clicks Yes, the file will open as expected. If the user clicks No, the file may open anyway, or may prompt a second time, and then not open if the user selects No again. “.  
My problem with Microsof’ts approach is they solve the problem by streaming warning messages to you for just about everything you do, so that after a few hours users are conditioned to just click thru any warning that comes up.  Here is an example pulled form the Northwind database :
Note that the user can’t use the application until they make it a trusted application.  This has tripped up just about all my clients.  And how many clients that use Access databases will figure out how to open the database from a trusted location,
As a Microsoft Certified Professional developer, I am amazed at the half baked security crap Microsoft has been throwing at us (And for you Windows 7 users, I will resist the urge to get into ‘Run as Administrator’).
I have had it.   The king is dead – long live web-apps, Google Chrome, and the cloud.

The Facebook IPO

The Facebook IPO was finally announced – 5% of the company for a targeted 5 billion.  Alot of people have an opinion on the valuation – I will add mine.

According to the filings, last years profit was 1 billion.  So that puts Facebook a market cap of 100 billion, and a trailing  P/E of 100.    To place that in context, Amazon has a market cap of 84 billion and a trailing PE of 134.  Apple has a market cap of 437 Billion and a trailing PE of 13.

Amazon’s PE has always been high due to the high revenue growth – for such a big company their year over year revenue growth is still amazing (30%+).  Facebook has a huge opportunity to increase their revenue – the revenue per user is tiny – and they have a bunch of ways they could increase it – more adds, social gaming, skimming % on Facebook credit transactions.

I am not a big Facebook user,  or frankly a Facebook fan, but given the opportunities open to it it doesnt seem inconceivable that they could execute on at least a few of their opportunities.  So put me in the camp that I think if the IPO comes out at the predicted price, it has a chance to be a pretty good investment.