smakz

What are you doing at work that you don't want people looking over your shoulder? Serious question by the way - it always comes up in work environments that some people are pretty against the lack of privacy that comes along with these types of set ups, but really if you are at work there shouldn't be too much (if anything) on your screen which is private.

I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.

If you have that, and also offer a few "quiet rooms" where you can go if things are loud or you need to check your personal email, I don't see what the problem is.

You're right, I'm not arguing very well. And please, I encourage any one not to take what I say very seriously either. If you want to invest, think for yourself, that is what I was really trying to say.

"The bottom line is this: Amazon trades at more than three times Apple's current valuation, eight times RIM's valuation and just about two and a half times Google's valuation. This is simply way too high."

The article is almost laughable in it's simplicity - if you take CNN/Fortune articles seriously please don't invest your money. This article is overly focusing on one antiquated notation that P/E is the only thing that matters, an idea that isn't taken seriously by anyone close to Wall Street or finance any more (if it ever was, seems like this idea is only perpetuated by "pop" finance drivel such as Fortune).

There are several more interesting metrics to look at when evaluating a stock, including cash flow, profit margin, return on equity, growth rates, and many more.

Amazon has been consistently growing in double digits throughout the recession. They have a profit margin of 3% (compared to Apple's lofty 20%). They have a market cap of 80 billion with annual sales of 24 billion versus Apple's market cap of 280 billion with annual sales of 65 billion.

Where is Amazon's growth ceiling in their respective markets? Where is Apple's? What is next for Apple after the iPad (which missed sales targets)?

If you are going to invest in a stock, you need to ask these tough questions and think for yourself. You can't just look at a P/E ratio and know whether a company is over or under valued. Amazon rode the recession with a 40+ P/E ratio, and now the market is picking up again. Decide for yourself whether it is risky or not to invest in AMZN.

I'm rooting for all the big technology companies to do really well: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ebay, Apple. Higher market caps means more flexibility in acquisitions, and these are the companies which aren't afraid to take risks.

Of course you are right, but the point remains, it is important to understand the percentage of equity that you own/will own and how that will change with future dilution.

Remember kids, when interviewing at private companies which offer stock rewards, always get firm answers about percentage owned and dilution. Getting 1,000,000 Facebook shares might sound good on an offer letter but without knowing the percentage that could be worth 6$.

Edited to remove comment about par value.

I've also heard rumors that Gmail and Adsense for Content aren't particularly profitable for Google. Of course I've also heard that the brand equity created with Gmail is very valuable and those two are extreme examples, but even based on similar rumors it's possible Google could shut down either one.

The flip side of course is that it becomes dangerous if you rely on any of Google's free services. An extreme example, but what happens if GMail isn't profitable enough? Maybe Adsense for content isn't pulling it's weight any more (if it ever has)?

411 was a fairly useful service, and while shutting it down is probably the right business move, it pushes me more and more to move my primary email account and diversifying my advertising.

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Completely agree, the name dropping around here can get tiresome quick. There was a great article on Mint vs. Wesabe posted here recently - in my opinion we need more articles like that and less Jobs is a design master/Zuckerberg is a genius/etc.

Honestly this seems like a cash grab from the federal government more then anything.

Knowing friends who worked at these companies, they never felt the anti competitive pressure, and several moved between the companies several times.

Most likely, the government found some clauses buried in some contracts that said in a foot note that the companies would agree not to cold call employees in their own respective companies. I don't even think it's unreasonable to have a contract along those lines if engineers are working directly with each other.

Although on the flip side, I think it might be valuable to send a message that anti-competitive agreements in general won't be tolerated and it's good to know that there are people watching this sort of thing.

Very true - the complexity of the system also comes into the equation when things go wrong and it takes real people to figure out why an outage is happening. Highly complex systems imply longer debugging time, and at a certain point a theoretically lower up time can give you higher practical up time just because engineers can actually understand and debug it.

A Witty Phrase Proves Nothing

- Voltaire

The point of the quote (to me at least) was to be taken more to inspire you to rethink perfection then to be taken literally at face value.

Very good points. Reminds me of this quote:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs.

Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.

It sounds to me like you are quoting verbatim something Chris Anderson might say.

Software companies in the valley have gotten along just fine charging for services and software with only giving users a token free trial. Microsoft and Oracle are doing just fine.

If you want to look at the big players on the web, there are far more public companies charging for services then there are whose main product is free. Akamai, Sales Force, Amazon, Ebay, NetFlix, Omniture (now adobe) I could go on and on.

When talking about public companies who give their primary service away for free, I can only think of 4examples with market caps over a billion: Google, Yahoo, IACI, and sometimes Monster.

There is a lot of hype about free, thanks especially to Chris Anderson's highly accessible book and influence, but if you look at the results and who really made it big (not 100 million dollar exit big, but multi billion dollar market cap big), starting with a business model where you charge your customers is the best way to achieve that.