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:
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 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.
This chart (from the article) shows how much growth is still left:
This has particular relevance to Microsoft. One would have to think that the huge amount of untapped market share are people that probably shop by price rather than features. With that market currently owned by Android – Microsoft may be faced with undercutting Android. It seems like a tough task to try to compete with Android on price – but it they want to be a player they may have to.
I am skeptical Microsoft can succeed with gaining significant market share – it shall be interesting to watch.
If we are nearing a tipping point on technology truly replacing major service industries – can we survive another wave of unemployment? It doesnt seem outside the realm of possibility the Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson could really make inroads into replacing low level service jobs – further swelling the ranks of the disenchanted unemployed.
If you have a few minutes – take the time to read the Economist article referenced – it presents interesting scenarios.
This service based architecture seems like it would be effective and keeping development groups relatively autonomous and cohesive, but still be able to leverage other groups technologies. It also would help allow developers to innovate within a defined framework. For the record – I think Amazon will be the big winner vs Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft over the next 10 years – largely due to Bezos’ leadership. It will be interesting to watch.
I am revisiting a thought I had several years ago about only investing in companies that have proven visionary leaders – rather than focusing on financials or valuation. Perhaps then I would of gotten into Apple earlier and out of Microsoft when Bill Gates retired. Perhaps a post on that another day.
So you can buy a prototype of the windows 8 tablet for $1,099. How much is Microsoft going to have to subsidize the end product to make the tablet attractive in comparison to its competitors? Especially if Amazon rolls out an Android based table for $299 ish. It will be interesting to see if Micrsosoft can pull it off.
There still are no good games for the Kinect for hard core gamers, so it must be driving a broadening of the appeal of XBOX to non-gamers. Microsoft is planning to roll out even more titles with Kinect support, but I contend the real future of Kinect is not with traditional gamers. The biggest market in games is first person shooters, and Kinects concept doesnt seem like it would translate well with first person shooters where the player is often having to look left, right and behind.
I still contend the Kinect will find its best market outside of gaming. Microsoft did not foresee the huge interest in people modifying the Kinect for other uses (see http://kinect.dashhacks.com/). By popular demand, Microsoft just released an SDK to allow programmers to write programs for the Kinect for the PC.
My guess is the Kinect will find a bigger market outside the gaming world than within it.
The growth of social networking on the internet has been very reminiscent of the internet bubble of 2001 – companies throwing money at social thinking that that’s the new economy. Linked-In IPO’d at amazing valuation, Groupon is soon to IPO at a what appears to be a high price, and some say Facebook will IPO in the 200 Billion range.
Much like the internet was overhyped in 2001, Social Networking is overhyped and poised for a big fall. Not to say that social networking is a worthless idea – much like the internet in 2001, sound business models just need to be designed around it. Thats why this article caught my eye:
A few years ago search engine optimization was all the rage – now you see alot less money thrown at that. I predict similar drop in interest in social networking. Interestingly, unlike the 2001 bubble that burst, the impact on public stocks wont be as big. Most of the social networking companies are funded by venture capital, to the direct impact to the stock market will be smaller.
the analyst says it will be possible for Microsoft to make a penny a share off display ads on Skype on 2010 – by my calculation that works out to about 84 million in 2012. Lets assume Skype breaks even in 2012, which seems reasonable (they lost money in 2010 and forecast to lose/breakeven in 2011).
Microsoft is paying 8.5 billion to get 84 million in 2012, up to 500 million in 5 years according to the analyst. Most people agree Microsoft didnt buy Skype for the technology or the earnings – they bought it for the eyeballs of Skype users and to keep those eyeballs away from Google or Facebook.
Berkshire Hathaway just paid 9.5 billion for Lubrizol, and Lubrizol is forecast to make 800 million to 1 billion in earnings in 2011 with earnings growth of 8 percent a year. No strategic reason for Berkshire to buy Lubrizol, other than it makes a bunch of money year after year.
Linked In just went public at at huge premiums to earnings – perhaps making Skype look reasonably priced. Looking at the price difference between Lubrizol and Skype/Linked in – its apparent we are in an internet bubble. Unfortunately, Microsoft is in the unenviable position of having to buy technology at these inflated prices.
I remarked to a friend the a few weeks ago that I thought it would be interesting to write a program that reads a sports box score and compose a news story. It would be an interesting programming exercise – however it turns out that I am too late. Narrative Sciences has already been formed to auto generate news stories from data. I have noticed that many financial news releases appear to be purely data driven – i think more robotic stories are on the way. The quality of the current stories is pretty poor – but I would think in a few years it could probably rival traditional sports summary stories.