Slashdot Mirror
Google to Include iTunes?
Baher Al Hakim writes "The Street suggests in a recent article that Apple is about to announce a deal with Google to offer Apple's iTunes Music service through Google's site.
The rumored deal would pair the nation's leading online music store with its leading search engine." Update: 08/13 22:00 GMT by T : Truncation untruncated.
Uhhhhhhhhh. Where's the rest of the story? lol
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
If you view the source, this link exists, with no anchor text....
Nice one, eds.
Yes, once again its another editor fuckup - why is everyone still so surprised that this happens? The 'editors' barely pay lip service to their title and I doubt very much that they read the comments either. At face value there is no real passion from the creators of the site - its just the same old shit day after day.
To explain further, Slashdot exists for one purpose: to make money for parent company OSDN. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but don't expect a high quality site the way its currently run. The Slashdot business model (if you can call it that) seems to be to provoke reaction from the loyal crowd of slashbots that frequent the site. Inflammatory / trollish stories (e.g here) and dupes cause the page hits (and therefore ad revenue) to go through the roof.
As a result, most of the comments I see on the stories are neither insightful, interesting or informative. There seems to be no real balanced discussion - something I feel is a product of the moderation system which rewards those who conform to the slashbot mindset and censors everything else. This democratic method of editing the comments is terrible - especially where technical issues are concerned, as a lot of nonsense is modded up by people who don't know otherwise.
You are probably wondering why I read Slashdot. Partly morbid curiosity and partly to laugh at both the flame wars which invevitably break out and the well crafted trolls.
To conclude, Slashdot is neither really "News for Nerds" nor is it "Stuff that matters". If you want the former, go to somewhere like arstechnica or kuroshin and if you want actual stuff that matters, the BBC are hard to beat.
Given their hacked open-source video player, and Google's buying of other products and services (keyhole, picasa, blogger) doesn't partnering with iTunes run astray from that precedent?
Or to google is this a step one to direct to consumer e-commerce by partnering with e-retailers to become a digital wares version of Amazon?
for apple it makes sense. One of the keys to getting more iTunes users is to help drive two things, at least: iPod sales and Quicktime adoption--particularly related to the latest vid and audio codecs. Apple would be in in for hardware sales and format saturation basically. Since they don't make boocoop profits from iTunes track sales beyond mindshare and marketshare, an alleged partnership with a diverse number of big players in various markets makes sense.
But, for Google...let's just hope that prior to the deal sales and marketing info garnered from iTunes isn't part of the deal for the all seeing G. You can be sure that the info gathered from post partnership would be of great interst to the all seeing G. For adsense reasons and whatever else it is that company does.
If I were Microsoft or one of the companies who use MS in some form (for example audio format like WMA), then i'd probably be shitting (pardon my french) bricks.
Pairing up the worlds most popular music service with the worlds most popular search engine is definitely a clever move by both parties, it can only serve to improve their customer bases. A symbiotic relationship if you will.
Apple stock seems a little overweight
Many investors look at the P/E vs. expected growth. If a company is growing 30% a year, then a trailing P/E of 38 isn't so bad. I believe Apple is growing closer to 15% but they still have a lot of potential market share to grab, are run efficiently, have great products, and great management (not just Jobs) so I'm comfortable with a P/E of 38.
Also you should compare with companies that are similar. HP and IBM are totally different companies so I don't think I'd compare either of those to Apple. Dell doesn't have Apple's style or target market, but it's probably a better comparison. Maybe Sony's electronics devision, if you can split it off from other parts of Sony, is a good comparison as well.
I personally feel the price is a little high at 46. I might not buy it now unless I'm looking out more than 10 years. However I'm a long-term investor and have been holding Apple since it was less than $10 per share, split-adjusted. (I recently sold a teeny sliver of my holdings and bought a 17-inch PB, heh.)
Anyway, my point is that their stock only went up because they're fashionable
No, the price went up because that's the price buyers and sellers agreed on. No other information can be gleaned by day-to-day swings in price. Don't even try.
I have a personal rule, I don't talk about trends in a company's stock price in any timeframe shorter than 5 years.
If you own Apple stock, start thinking about an exit strategy - at the very least make sure you have a trailing stop at $3 to $5 (7% to 10%) below peak price to protect your gains so you don't forfeit everything if the stock falls back to the $20 to $30 range in a few months.
"Exit strategy?" "Trailing stop"?" This is trader bullshit. Sorry you don't understand a thing about the stock market. Buy good companies and hold them as long as you can. Do you trade and set trailing stops with your other assets? Your car? Furniture? Art? Heirlooms? Your house? Don't do it with stock assets.
Only 25% of active "consumer" traders (the ones who trade frequently but AREN'T working on wall street) beat the market after taxes and commissions (heard it on Motley Fool).
In other words, you can do better by putting all your money in VTI or a similar instrument, reinvesting dividends via DRIP, and doing nothing after that. Not as exciting and when your friends spew bullshit about "trading strategy" you'll have nothing to say, but you'll have a shitload more in the bank 20 years from now.
8) Profit!!!