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Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a "Real Business"
theodp writes According to Steve Ballmer, Amazon.com is not a real business. "They make no money," Ballmer said on the Charlie Rose Show. "In my world, you're not a real business until you make some money. I have a hard time with businesses that don't make money at some point." Ballmer's comments come as Amazon posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, disappointing Wall Street. "If you are worth $150 billion," Ballmer added, "eventually somebody thinks you're going to make $15 billion pre-tax. They make about zero, and there's a big gap between zero and 15." Fired-up as ever, LA Clippers owner Ballmer's diss comes after fellow NBA owner Mark Cuban similarly slammed IBM, saying Big Blue is no longer a tech company (Robert X. Cringely seems to concur). "Today, they [IBM] specialize in financial engineering," Cuban told CNBC after IBM posted another disappointing quarter. "They're no longer a tech company, they are an amalgamation of different companies that they are trying to arb[itrage] on Wall Street, and I'm not a fan of that at all."
You're a decade out. Microsoft's initial success was Microsoft BASIC, which was actually pretty good, back in the '70s. IBM wanted them to port BASIC to the PC and, when their negotiations for CP/M as the OS fell through, asked MS to write them an OS too. MS bought QDOS and rebranded it (and there was a lawsuit later about this, so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS). They also sold MS DOS to PC clone makers, which helped cement them in the market. At the time, there were a number of MS DOS clones that were better, but they made their other products depend on their own version to force others out of the market. By the '90s, with Windows 3.0 only running on MS DOS, they were getting pretty good at it...
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You might want to read some news from the last decade. Microsoft started paying dividends in 2003 and has paid them annually. When they started, investors were unhappy because it showed that they no longer thought that the best thing to do to increase value was to invest the money in the company.
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No, they're selling the fab division and keeping the R&D division. They're turning into a design house, like ARM.
You're still not on the mark. Microsofts success was BUYING DOS for $50k. Talk about profit.
Previous to that, I suppose Bills education as a Lawyer was probably the fuel for later hijinx.
I still like the part about his 1st OS for the Altair being sold on punchcards which in turn were copied by enthusiasts and shared.
Bill still made a profit, but the die was cast for a poor business model.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Previous to that, I suppose Bills education as a Lawyer was probably the fuel for later hijinx.
Bill dropped out of a computer science program to start a business building software for traffic statistics equipment. Going to Harvard is not the same as being educated as a lawyer-- they DO teach other things than law there.
Seriously, where are people getting all of their bogus info? Every thread its people spouting about crypto, history, politics, and 90% of it is wrong.
But last quarter's loss was big, too big. That is why the stock suddenly took a hit.
As many folks have already pointed out in other threads on the subject, Intel screwed up the Haswell line by using an entirely different pinout on the i7 than on the i5. The result is that any motherboard with soldered-on chips has to be specifically designed for one or the other.
Apple chose the i5, presumably because that's the hardware grade where most of the Mini's sales came from, rather than doubling their R&D cost by building two very different motherboards.
Here's hoping Intel doesn't screw up Broadwell in the same way.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
MP3 players existed before the iPod
Smartphones existed before the iPhone
Tablets existed before the iPad
Smartwatches exist, and the iWatch doesn't
Apple doesn't create new categories; they polish and popularise them - sort of the way Blizzard has done with the RTS, action-RPG, and MMO genres in gaming.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
There are many ways to look at it. I look from an investor's view.
Microsoft stock was selling at $58/share in December of 1999, just before Ballmer became CEO. There has been one split of MS stock since then, in 2003, a 2-for-1 split. The current price of MS stock is now $46. So if you purchased a share just before Ballmer took over, your $58 would now be worth $92. MS's average quarterly dividends over the same time are around $0.18/share. Given that the stock split happened in early 2003, you'd have double that dividend for most of the time frame (2 shares), so rounding it up for easy calculation, you'd have earned roughly $20 total dividends on your initial purchase over the 14 years. That's a total of 93% profit for 14 years of investment.
During the same time frame, Amazon has had no stock splits. In December 1999, Amazon stock was selling for $106/share. Now it's selling for $287/share. That's a 170% profit if you purchased stock in 1999.
Granted, if you had taken your MS dividends and invested them, you might have earned more in the MS scenario, depending on how you invested those dividends. If you put them in a savings account, you would have earned about $0.05 over the 14 years.
Amazon was the better investment, even if they didn't pay dividends. Ballmer's just jealous.