I'm not the most price sensitive guy out there but price is always a factor I guess. I was a little shocked by the price too. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a price tag of $600-800 (still too expensive), but I just don't see the return on investment at $1200. I guess the target market for these is overpaid executives.:-) If the device was lights-out better than anything else maybe, but I just don't see that as being the case. My biggest concern is that like most portable devices, if you aren't an Outlook or maybe Lotus Notes user (I use Thunderbird), address book integration and syncing (not just import/export) is probably just not practical. I also can't figure out if it supports iCal.
Thanks for the info. Much appreciated. What sorts of applications have you put on your n800 beyond what it ships with? How efficient/intuitive is the interface? Is viewing data (like spreadsheets) on it realistic or beyond its abilities? What browser does it use? Can one watch movies on it? Does it have a decent address book or (preferably) can it use Thunderbird's?
Or carry a separate cell phone and pair with it via Bluetooth. But if you've carrying the cell phone, you might as well let it display the satellite maps (my Treo [palm.com] does this) and forgo the extra weight.
That's a matter of personal preference. I personally prefer a small, relatively cheap cell phone connected via bluetooth since I use that more than a PDA/tablet. (presently I use a Nokia 6820) I also carry said cell phone in my pants pocket normally. Putting a $400+ device in my pocket for features I need only occasionally doesn't make sense based on how I use these things. Too much risk of damage/loss to my mind. Plus I have yet to see a smartphone (including the iPhone, Treos and Blackberries) that has a screen big enough to make web surfing practical, much less pleasant. I'm just not satisfied with the tradeoffs I have to make with the smartphones so far. For the times when I need a PDA/tablet, the advantages (especially a bigger screen) outweigh the need for an extra device & weight and when I don't need it, I don't have to lug it around. Still a tradeoff but one that works for me. Your needs may be different than mine but that doesn't make either of us wrong.
I'm intrigued by this Nokia device but I'm suspicious how well it will actually connect and work with other devices, especially my PC. The software Nokia has provided to connect to other devices (especially PCs) has historically sucked. Everything is overly proprietary and flakey. Forget integrating address books unless you are an Outlook user. Nokia tends to make software that is just enough for them to checkbox a feature (i.e. the calendar on most of their cell phones) without actually being useful for that purpose. I'd love to try one of these hands on but doubt I'll ever get the chance.
In the last few years I have rarely been able to find products I am shopping for at less than retail prices on eBay unless they are damaged.
Disclosure: I used to make a significant my living off of a company selling things on eBay up until recently. I've sold (or tried to sell) pretty much everything you can imagine on eBay from beenie babies to a Lear jet (no joke) and everything in between.
The only things that are retail price are new in box items that have not been on the market long enough for a secondary market to develop. If that's what you are looking for, eBay is just not the right place to look unless the item is quite rare. I wouldn't buy an iPhone off eBay for example. Too much risk for too little discount. That said, for most secondary market items you typically can purchase any used item for approximately 1/3 of retail. That's a very crude rule of thumb but I have the sales data to support it. Sales on eBay are VERY brand sensitive and it's VERY hard to make a profit unless you are a manufacturer (in which case you probably aren't selling on eBay) or highly specialized. There are too many sellers out there competing for there to be any margin on most items andeBay and Paypal fees will pretty much suck away any remaining margin. It's fine for turning items into cash, just don't expect to make a profit doing it.
Frankly the only reason eBay has remained top dog is network effects. eBay is where the buyers are and where the sellers are so it's hard to effectively auction most items anywhere else. eBay knows this and has increased their fees every year for the last several years, mostly at the expense of the users. Their IT backend and support is abysmally poor, they provide no $ incentives to volume sellers, and they their conflict resolution and fraud prevention policies are absurd. I don't really care to do business with a company that treats their customers so poorly.
It's not hugely beneficial to have things delivered in hours...
I'm an industrial engineer and global sourcing is what I do for a living. Yes having things delivered in hours is hugely beneficial, if not always necessary. It's just not usually economically possible for a lot of products. Just-In-Time delivery exists because of the cost of storage and transport are so high for many products, even durable ones. If air transport was anywhere close to as cheap as sea transport, (almost) no one would use boats. Economics wins out over logistics almost every time. But all other things being equal (and they almost never are equal) faster delivery is better. We use slower delivery methods because the trade offs economically favor the slower method but never forget there is a cost to slower delivery. It may be overshadowed by other costs but it's still there.
Seafood, cut flowers, produce and lots of other products use air transport every day because sea transport is too slow. Food preservation is an enormously important industry precisely because of the inefficiencies in transportation. Go to your grocery store. Fresh salmon from Chile doesn't last for 6 days much less 6 weeks unfrozen or unpreserved. A huge percentage of the produce was transported by air because it's the only way to get it to market before it spoils. Over time these products along with technology improvements in aircraft will pave the way for other products to be transported economically by air. Will ocean vessels disappear? Of course not. They have certain advantages which aren't going away in our grandchildren's lifetimes. But that does not change the fact that there is a cost to slow delivery even for products which do not spoil. Storing and transporting a product is not free no matter how slow the transport becomes. Cut product delivery times from China and India from weeks to days while keeping costs contained and you will change the world economy more than you can imagine.
A vanishingly small number of situations require a specific material object to cross the globe in a couple hours.
Are you kidding? If I could get products from China delivered here in the US within hours economically that would be HUGELY beneficial. Long delivery lead times are an enormous cost for a huge variety of products. It takes weeks for a ship to cross the ocean. Cut that to days or hours (at a reasonable cost) and you have altered the global economy forever. That's just products. There is a lot of value in being able to deliver people to distant destinations quickly as well. The problem is that the technology doesn't exist to make such transport both quick and cheap. But the need is there even if the technology isn't (economically) there yet.
There is no such thing as 'legal' second-hand Autodesk software.
disclaimer IANAL
The license may not extend beyond the first purchaser (that's a contractual agreement assuming everything is done correctly in the license) but the license very likely does not extend to the physical medium (box, CD, etc) on which it was shipped. Without knowing the exact terms of their license the buyer probably does own the CD and can resell it for whatever amount of money they desire. The license is probably not provided prior to purchasing the medium on which the software is delivered. It's quite possible to own a copy of some software without having a valid license to use said software.
Whether Autodesk is bound to honor a transferred license is a separate issue and a purely contractual one as far as I can tell.
Basically we are saying the same thing but your correct use of revenue vs my use in the gp's terms got in the way!
Fair enough. It's an unfortunate reality that in general in the finance world people are too loose with definitions. Drove me nuts when I was first learning about all this in school. You seem to have the concept down but there are a LOT of people who really just don't grasp the difference between revenue and profit. I try to educate where I can to help.
Earnings are not Revenue. Earnings are profit. Revenue is total sales. It's VERY important that you understand the difference. Companies are not valued based on their P/E ratio. The only real use of a P/E ratio is to determine if a stock price is relatively high compared to similar companies. It tells you nothing about how much the company is actually worth. The market capitalization can be important (if the company is publicly traded) but the P/E does not give you a value of the company in any meaningful way.
P/E ratios also have NOTHING to do with revenue multiples and aren't used directly for acquisitions. When one company buys another they rarely are looking at the P/E ratio. In fact if the earnings are negative the company will not have a P/E ratio! Typically the buyer will offer some price based on some multiple of the annual revenue (usually 1-2X) or preferably the EBITDA if the company is profitable (typically 5-8X). For example if the company has annual revenue of $1,000,000 and EBITDA of $150,000, the buyer might offer between $1,000,000 (1X revenue) and $1,200,000 (8X EBIDTA). In cases where only a portion of the company is purchased you get an implied value (how much the buyer thinks the company is worth) based on their offer. If you were to offer $100,000 for 10% of the company you are implicitly putting a value of $1,000,000 on the company.
Right now we're in a bit of a speculative mergers and acquisitions bubble so valuations have been rather high lately. But make no mistake, offering 10X revenue for a company is a VERY generous offer. If someone offered me 10X revenue for a company I owned I'd sell faster than you could say "generous multiple".
Many companies sell for 10 times what their yearly revenue is.
Only if they are highly prospective ventures with a large potential upside, little/no earnings and possibly purchased during a speculative bubble. Most firms are purchased for between 1X and 2.5X revenue, or 5X to 8X EBITDA. Any multiple over 3X revenue is a very rich valuation. 10X is purely speculative and the buyer had better hope they have the next google on their hands if they want to get any profit from the investment. Last time we saw 10X multiples was during the dotcom bubble in 1999/2000.
Microsoft has a lot of smart people working for them but they are offering a LOT of money for this company. Might be worth it but I'd be surprised,... no shocked, if they aren't overpaying.
I don't know what it's like for CDs, but for books a 41% retail markup is pretty low.
True enough but the markup is only part of the picture. What's more important is the gross margin of the company. In the retail book/CD industry gross margins are around20% which is pretty crappy compared to most industries. Only way to make any real money is with huge scale (i.e. Amazon) because the margins are so bad.
Basically all the money in music is taken by the labels/RIAA-members and in some cases device manufacturers such as Apple or Sony with the labels getting the majority. The labels control the availability via copyright and more importantly distribution. (A copyright isn't worth much if you can't distribute or control distribution of the work in question) Apple is in a position to supplant the labels as the most important gatekeeper in distribution and it rightfully makes the RIAA members very uncomfortable. Should iTunes become the dominant distribution medium, you can bet the profits will start to swing more in Apple's favor in due time.
Coal isn't an option, and we are (or should be) working to run the hell away from coal as quickly as possible.
In principle I agree that coal is not a fuel of first choice (or second or third...) from an environmental perspective. It's dirty, dangerous to mine, hard to clean and has other problems besides. Unfortunately the two biggest manufacturing economies in the world (China & the USA) have HUGE coal reserves and are relatively poor in most other economically competitive fuels. (note the word relatively, obviously both have access to oil, gas, uranium and any other fuel you care to mention) Coal's simple abundance and the installed base of coal fired power plants means it's not going away any time soon. I'm fully in favor of regulating coal to be as clean as technology allows, even at some economic cost. But hoping that the worlds biggest economy will turn its back on a cheap, abundant energy supply, even if it is dirty and undesirable, is just not realistic.
AT&T could have done well, if they'd just cared about the customer.
Disclosure: My father worked for AT&T->Ameritech->SBC->AT&T for 30 years and my grandfather for 20 years before that. I got to hear about them for most of my childhood. Hence my opinions of the company are significantly colored by his experiences but I think I understand the company fairly well.
To understand AT&T (note I didn't say accept or like) you have to understand that their corporate culture is that of a government sanctioned utility. For years AT&T was the only game in town until the early 1980s when the company was broken up. But there still was no competition, simply smaller regional versions of the same company and the company culture didn't change one bit. The company still thinks like a monopoly utility and behaves like one. Hence, their customer service tends to be crap because they are under the (often correct) opinion that you have little/no alternatives.
There are dedicated individuals working at AT&T to be sure but there are far too many stereotypical union paycheck collectors who don't give a damn. I've met more than a few personally and professionally. Your chances of interacting with one of these slackers is relatively high unfortunately.
I had the opportunity to sit in a meeting recently with Ed Whitacre, the outgoing CEO of AT&T. He was talking about strategy and some opinions about issues of the day including net neutrality, video services, bundled services, and a few others. Basically I came away thinking he was disingenuous and arrogant wrapped in an "aw shucks" good old boy routine. His opinions on the topics mentioned would set off a flame war here on slashdot. He spun weaknesses of their services (such as the smaller bandwidth for their video services versus cable) as if they were somehow what people wanted. He acted as if Google and every other web service were getting a better deal than they deserved. He didn't give a crap about the customer, he simply cares about the bottom line for AT&T. Not shocking to be sure but I expected the CEO to be at least a little less obvious about their contempt for their customers.
The exams in law school (and I believe medical school) tend not to be multiple choice.
Can't speak for law school but virtually every exam my wife took in med school as well as for her licensing exams was multiple choice. She informs me that most if not all med schools in the United States give the vast majority of tests in multiple choice format. The main exceptions are practical examinations where multiple choice is not an option.
How many people really care about the server back-end when it comes to something like Quickbooks?
Anyone who runs more than one seat of Quickbooks ought to care.
I agree that the lack of a Quickbooks client on linux matters to more people. Unfortunately linux does not have sufficient desktop marketshare to reasonably expect a company like Intuit to develop the product. If/when linux captures a meaningful share of the desktop PC market (5-10% minimum) then there is a business case Intuit management will listen to. I would love to be able to set my clients up with a linux only solution for Quickbooks but all the PCs we buy already have Windows so it's kind of a moot issue from a practical standpoint. What I don't like is having to maintain a special server for Quickbooks.
Servers are another matter entirely since linux has double digit marketshare there. A linux backend is a huge first step and one I welcome. That cuts the number of servers required by potentially one and the hardware savings alone can justify it to a small business. I hope they will extend this product to the Premium and Pro versions.
For photos, inkjets are still generally superior in my opinion. (hence my caveat) Thermal wax printers can get good picture results too but it's harder to get supplies for them. For office and presentation use the current lasers are generally more than adequate and cost effective. For text lasers are much better in most cases Personally if I had something that needed serious printing quality I'd be traveling to Kinkos or some other print shop rather than doing it myself anyway. I think it's fine to keep an inkjet around for printing pictures (I do) but unless that is the majority of what you do they're just too expensive to be worthwhile.
I have one of these with the multi-function scanner unit, duplex, envelope feeder and extra paper trays. Cost under $300 on eBay and prints 25,000 pages on a single toner cartridge. Cost per page is $0.015-0.04 per page. I'm on my second third toner cartridge in five years. (yeah I print a lot) True, it doesn't do color but I rarely need that and have a throwaway inkjet (acquired for free) for the odd color print.
Inkjets are the best option in certain circumstances but most folks would be much better served by investing the money for a laser printer, especially if they don't need color.
I don't know about margins, but a couple of months ago they closed down a Borders and were offering books at 40% off.
That's a liquidation sale and the usual rules don't apply. When they close down a store they are simply trying to turn as much inventory as possible into cash, even if they take a loss in the process. The alternative is to simply put the book into the landfill which makes for a 100% loss instead of partial loss.
Ironically, the gross margins at the bookstore itself are better than online for Borders since they can usually sell the books for cover price. But the net margins are hurt because they have to pay for all the property, sales staff, etc. Leased warehouse space costs $3-$10 per square foot depending on quality and location. Retail space like you see in a Borders can be anywhere from $15-$35 or more.
Lately I've found that nerdbooks.com is cheaper than Amazon
You can often find companies willing to sell select merchandise cheaper, or to undercut prices for a time to gain customers. But unless nerdbooks.com has a special source not available to Amazon, they won't be able to profitably sustain cheaper prices for long. There simply isn't enough profit in the business to do that. Specialty bookstores can do ok if they have a loyal clientèle willing to pay a bit more (maybe in a high priced location like Greenwich, CT) or they provide specialty products/services the big boys don't. But if it is a pure price game it's a losing proposition to compete with Barnes&Noble, Amazon and Borders. They simply have a bigger bankroll and can get the merchandise cheaper than the smaller players.
I know a lot of computer manufacturers that would kill for 21% margins.
Yes, there are worse businesses to be in than book sales. I assume that is your point? Airlines, consumer electronics, and several others come to mind. UAL (United Airlines parent company) has gross margins of 14%. Consumer electronics (and I include PCs in that category) is a low-margin cut-throat business. What do books, airplane seats, and PCs have in common? They are all effectively commodities. Anytime you are selling a commodity of any sort, margins are going to be thin unless demand greatly outstrips supply (see oil) for a period of time or there is some other barrier to market entry such as patent protection (see drugs).
I've always suspected that Border's biggest margins are on their coffee and muffins.
That's probably true actually. Starbucks has gross margins of almost 59% which is obscenely high for any company selling a non-software product. While it's probably not an apples to apples comparison, Borders probably does make better margins on their coffee and deserts than on their books. Even outsourcing the operations to a third party there still is enough margin there to make a reasonable profit.
Sales tax, schmales tax, couldn't they just drop the price of the books they sell so their price with sales tax is competitive with amazon without tax?
Not really, no. Amazon has gross margins of about 21% and so does Borders. In case that doesn't mean anything to you, 21% gross margin isn't spectacular. That means Amazon and Borders are not making a lot on each sale and there isn't a lot of fat to cut out. Books on Amazon are typically already discounted pretty steeply. Borders doesn't get any economies of scale that aren't also available to Amazon and Borders has physical stores to maintain. Sure, Borders could discount down to zero profit but neither company is likely to do that unless they think they can get some advantage out of it and I can see no advantage for either side in a price war right now.
It's not hard to find specific cases where Windows is cheaper. The problem is when people use specific instances of cheaper TCO using linux or Windows to generalize which one is cheaper for other cases. It is easy to find specific cases where linux is the better option and others where Windows makes more sense. Finding examples however does not answer the question of which is more cost effective in general. I'm not sure there is a good way to answer that other than to assume that companies are rational enterprises and that they will gravitate over time towards to most cost effective solution. Installed base size might be the best available (albeit highly imperfect) measure if you accept the above premise. If linux is growing in market share, that might be rationally construed as evidence that companies are finding the TCO of linux to be lower. It's not the only factor of course but I think it is a reasonable inference.
For the desktop machines in my company which was cheaper depended entirely upon how we used the machines. We ran our servers on SuSE linux but for the desktop machines we needed specific applications where the linux alternatives were sufficiently inferior as to make them not cost effective. For our server needs there was no comparison, linux was vastly more cost effective. TCO is specific to the needs of the organization and/or individuals using the product. Its going to differ on a case by case basis and we would be foolish to generalize our needs to that of the IT community at large.
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I'm not the most price sensitive guy out there but price is always a factor I guess. I was a little shocked by the price too. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a price tag of $600-800 (still too expensive), but I just don't see the return on investment at $1200. I guess the target market for these is overpaid executives. :-) If the device was lights-out better than anything else maybe, but I just don't see that as being the case. My biggest concern is that like most portable devices, if you aren't an Outlook or maybe Lotus Notes user (I use Thunderbird), address book integration and syncing (not just import/export) is probably just not practical. I also can't figure out if it supports iCal.
The Nokia E90 is very nice but not worth $1200. Maybe for $400 or so.
Thanks again. I appreciate you taking the time. Best wishes.
Thanks for the info. Much appreciated. What sorts of applications have you put on your n800 beyond what it ships with? How efficient/intuitive is the interface? Is viewing data (like spreadsheets) on it realistic or beyond its abilities? What browser does it use? Can one watch movies on it? Does it have a decent address book or (preferably) can it use Thunderbird's?
That's a matter of personal preference. I personally prefer a small, relatively cheap cell phone connected via bluetooth since I use that more than a PDA/tablet. (presently I use a Nokia 6820) I also carry said cell phone in my pants pocket normally. Putting a $400+ device in my pocket for features I need only occasionally doesn't make sense based on how I use these things. Too much risk of damage/loss to my mind. Plus I have yet to see a smartphone (including the iPhone, Treos and Blackberries) that has a screen big enough to make web surfing practical, much less pleasant. I'm just not satisfied with the tradeoffs I have to make with the smartphones so far. For the times when I need a PDA/tablet, the advantages (especially a bigger screen) outweigh the need for an extra device & weight and when I don't need it, I don't have to lug it around. Still a tradeoff but one that works for me. Your needs may be different than mine but that doesn't make either of us wrong.
I'm intrigued by this Nokia device but I'm suspicious how well it will actually connect and work with other devices, especially my PC. The software Nokia has provided to connect to other devices (especially PCs) has historically sucked. Everything is overly proprietary and flakey. Forget integrating address books unless you are an Outlook user. Nokia tends to make software that is just enough for them to checkbox a feature (i.e. the calendar on most of their cell phones) without actually being useful for that purpose. I'd love to try one of these hands on but doubt I'll ever get the chance.
Disclosure: I used to make a significant my living off of a company selling things on eBay up until recently. I've sold (or tried to sell) pretty much everything you can imagine on eBay from beenie babies to a Lear jet (no joke) and everything in between.
The only things that are retail price are new in box items that have not been on the market long enough for a secondary market to develop. If that's what you are looking for, eBay is just not the right place to look unless the item is quite rare. I wouldn't buy an iPhone off eBay for example. Too much risk for too little discount. That said, for most secondary market items you typically can purchase any used item for approximately 1/3 of retail. That's a very crude rule of thumb but I have the sales data to support it. Sales on eBay are VERY brand sensitive and it's VERY hard to make a profit unless you are a manufacturer (in which case you probably aren't selling on eBay) or highly specialized. There are too many sellers out there competing for there to be any margin on most items andeBay and Paypal fees will pretty much suck away any remaining margin. It's fine for turning items into cash, just don't expect to make a profit doing it.
Frankly the only reason eBay has remained top dog is network effects. eBay is where the buyers are and where the sellers are so it's hard to effectively auction most items anywhere else. eBay knows this and has increased their fees every year for the last several years, mostly at the expense of the users. Their IT backend and support is abysmally poor, they provide no $ incentives to volume sellers, and they their conflict resolution and fraud prevention policies are absurd. I don't really care to do business with a company that treats their customers so poorly.
I'm an industrial engineer and global sourcing is what I do for a living. Yes having things delivered in hours is hugely beneficial, if not always necessary. It's just not usually economically possible for a lot of products. Just-In-Time delivery exists because of the cost of storage and transport are so high for many products, even durable ones. If air transport was anywhere close to as cheap as sea transport, (almost) no one would use boats. Economics wins out over logistics almost every time. But all other things being equal (and they almost never are equal) faster delivery is better. We use slower delivery methods because the trade offs economically favor the slower method but never forget there is a cost to slower delivery. It may be overshadowed by other costs but it's still there.
Seafood, cut flowers, produce and lots of other products use air transport every day because sea transport is too slow. Food preservation is an enormously important industry precisely because of the inefficiencies in transportation. Go to your grocery store. Fresh salmon from Chile doesn't last for 6 days much less 6 weeks unfrozen or unpreserved. A huge percentage of the produce was transported by air because it's the only way to get it to market before it spoils. Over time these products along with technology improvements in aircraft will pave the way for other products to be transported economically by air. Will ocean vessels disappear? Of course not. They have certain advantages which aren't going away in our grandchildren's lifetimes. But that does not change the fact that there is a cost to slow delivery even for products which do not spoil. Storing and transporting a product is not free no matter how slow the transport becomes. Cut product delivery times from China and India from weeks to days while keeping costs contained and you will change the world economy more than you can imagine.
Are you kidding? If I could get products from China delivered here in the US within hours economically that would be HUGELY beneficial. Long delivery lead times are an enormous cost for a huge variety of products. It takes weeks for a ship to cross the ocean. Cut that to days or hours (at a reasonable cost) and you have altered the global economy forever. That's just products. There is a lot of value in being able to deliver people to distant destinations quickly as well. The problem is that the technology doesn't exist to make such transport both quick and cheap. But the need is there even if the technology isn't (economically) there yet.
disclaimer IANAL
The license may not extend beyond the first purchaser (that's a contractual agreement assuming everything is done correctly in the license) but the license very likely does not extend to the physical medium (box, CD, etc) on which it was shipped. Without knowing the exact terms of their license the buyer probably does own the CD and can resell it for whatever amount of money they desire. The license is probably not provided prior to purchasing the medium on which the software is delivered. It's quite possible to own a copy of some software without having a valid license to use said software.
Whether Autodesk is bound to honor a transferred license is a separate issue and a purely contractual one as far as I can tell.
Fair enough. It's an unfortunate reality that in general in the finance world people are too loose with definitions. Drove me nuts when I was first learning about all this in school. You seem to have the concept down but there are a LOT of people who really just don't grasp the difference between revenue and profit. I try to educate where I can to help.
Earnings are not Revenue. Earnings are profit. Revenue is total sales. It's VERY important that you understand the difference. Companies are not valued based on their P/E ratio. The only real use of a P/E ratio is to determine if a stock price is relatively high compared to similar companies. It tells you nothing about how much the company is actually worth. The market capitalization can be important (if the company is publicly traded) but the P/E does not give you a value of the company in any meaningful way.
P/E ratios also have NOTHING to do with revenue multiples and aren't used directly for acquisitions. When one company buys another they rarely are looking at the P/E ratio. In fact if the earnings are negative the company will not have a P/E ratio! Typically the buyer will offer some price based on some multiple of the annual revenue (usually 1-2X) or preferably the EBITDA if the company is profitable (typically 5-8X). For example if the company has annual revenue of $1,000,000 and EBITDA of $150,000, the buyer might offer between $1,000,000 (1X revenue) and $1,200,000 (8X EBIDTA). In cases where only a portion of the company is purchased you get an implied value (how much the buyer thinks the company is worth) based on their offer. If you were to offer $100,000 for 10% of the company you are implicitly putting a value of $1,000,000 on the company.
Right now we're in a bit of a speculative mergers and acquisitions bubble so valuations have been rather high lately. But make no mistake, offering 10X revenue for a company is a VERY generous offer. If someone offered me 10X revenue for a company I owned I'd sell faster than you could say "generous multiple".
Only if they are highly prospective ventures with a large potential upside, little/no earnings and possibly purchased during a speculative bubble. Most firms are purchased for between 1X and 2.5X revenue, or 5X to 8X EBITDA. Any multiple over 3X revenue is a very rich valuation. 10X is purely speculative and the buyer had better hope they have the next google on their hands if they want to get any profit from the investment. Last time we saw 10X multiples was during the dotcom bubble in 1999/2000.
Microsoft has a lot of smart people working for them but they are offering a LOT of money for this company. Might be worth it but I'd be surprised,... no shocked, if they aren't overpaying.
True enough but the markup is only part of the picture. What's more important is the gross margin of the company. In the retail book/CD industry gross margins are around 20% which is pretty crappy compared to most industries. Only way to make any real money is with huge scale (i.e. Amazon) because the margins are so bad.
Basically all the money in music is taken by the labels/RIAA-members and in some cases device manufacturers such as Apple or Sony with the labels getting the majority. The labels control the availability via copyright and more importantly distribution. (A copyright isn't worth much if you can't distribute or control distribution of the work in question) Apple is in a position to supplant the labels as the most important gatekeeper in distribution and it rightfully makes the RIAA members very uncomfortable. Should iTunes become the dominant distribution medium, you can bet the profits will start to swing more in Apple's favor in due time.
In principle I agree that coal is not a fuel of first choice (or second or third...) from an environmental perspective. It's dirty, dangerous to mine, hard to clean and has other problems besides. Unfortunately the two biggest manufacturing economies in the world (China & the USA) have HUGE coal reserves and are relatively poor in most other economically competitive fuels. (note the word relatively, obviously both have access to oil, gas, uranium and any other fuel you care to mention) Coal's simple abundance and the installed base of coal fired power plants means it's not going away any time soon. I'm fully in favor of regulating coal to be as clean as technology allows, even at some economic cost. But hoping that the worlds biggest economy will turn its back on a cheap, abundant energy supply, even if it is dirty and undesirable, is just not realistic.
Disclosure: My father worked for AT&T->Ameritech->SBC->AT&T for 30 years and my grandfather for 20 years before that. I got to hear about them for most of my childhood. Hence my opinions of the company are significantly colored by his experiences but I think I understand the company fairly well.
To understand AT&T (note I didn't say accept or like) you have to understand that their corporate culture is that of a government sanctioned utility. For years AT&T was the only game in town until the early 1980s when the company was broken up. But there still was no competition, simply smaller regional versions of the same company and the company culture didn't change one bit. The company still thinks like a monopoly utility and behaves like one. Hence, their customer service tends to be crap because they are under the (often correct) opinion that you have little/no alternatives.
There are dedicated individuals working at AT&T to be sure but there are far too many stereotypical union paycheck collectors who don't give a damn. I've met more than a few personally and professionally. Your chances of interacting with one of these slackers is relatively high unfortunately.
I had the opportunity to sit in a meeting recently with Ed Whitacre, the outgoing CEO of AT&T. He was talking about strategy and some opinions about issues of the day including net neutrality, video services, bundled services, and a few others. Basically I came away thinking he was disingenuous and arrogant wrapped in an "aw shucks" good old boy routine. His opinions on the topics mentioned would set off a flame war here on slashdot. He spun weaknesses of their services (such as the smaller bandwidth for their video services versus cable) as if they were somehow what people wanted. He acted as if Google and every other web service were getting a better deal than they deserved. He didn't give a crap about the customer, he simply cares about the bottom line for AT&T. Not shocking to be sure but I expected the CEO to be at least a little less obvious about their contempt for their customers.
Can't speak for law school but virtually every exam my wife took in med school as well as for her licensing exams was multiple choice. She informs me that most if not all med schools in the United States give the vast majority of tests in multiple choice format. The main exceptions are practical examinations where multiple choice is not an option.
Anyone who runs more than one seat of Quickbooks ought to care.
I agree that the lack of a Quickbooks client on linux matters to more people. Unfortunately linux does not have sufficient desktop marketshare to reasonably expect a company like Intuit to develop the product. If/when linux captures a meaningful share of the desktop PC market (5-10% minimum) then there is a business case Intuit management will listen to. I would love to be able to set my clients up with a linux only solution for Quickbooks but all the PCs we buy already have Windows so it's kind of a moot issue from a practical standpoint. What I don't like is having to maintain a special server for Quickbooks.
Servers are another matter entirely since linux has double digit marketshare there. A linux backend is a huge first step and one I welcome. That cuts the number of servers required by potentially one and the hardware savings alone can justify it to a small business. I hope they will extend this product to the Premium and Pro versions.
Easy solution for that. Pee all over the seat. One way or another it won't be a problem again...
For photos, inkjets are still generally superior in my opinion. (hence my caveat) Thermal wax printers can get good picture results too but it's harder to get supplies for them. For office and presentation use the current lasers are generally more than adequate and cost effective. For text lasers are much better in most cases Personally if I had something that needed serious printing quality I'd be traveling to Kinkos or some other print shop rather than doing it myself anyway. I think it's fine to keep an inkjet around for printing pictures (I do) but unless that is the majority of what you do they're just too expensive to be worthwhile.
I have one of these with the multi-function scanner unit, duplex, envelope feeder and extra paper trays. Cost under $300 on eBay and prints 25,000 pages on a single toner cartridge. Cost per page is $0.015-0.04 per page. I'm on my second third toner cartridge in five years. (yeah I print a lot) True, it doesn't do color but I rarely need that and have a throwaway inkjet (acquired for free) for the odd color print.
Inkjets are the best option in certain circumstances but most folks would be much better served by investing the money for a laser printer, especially if they don't need color.
That's a liquidation sale and the usual rules don't apply. When they close down a store they are simply trying to turn as much inventory as possible into cash, even if they take a loss in the process. The alternative is to simply put the book into the landfill which makes for a 100% loss instead of partial loss.
Ironically, the gross margins at the bookstore itself are better than online for Borders since they can usually sell the books for cover price. But the net margins are hurt because they have to pay for all the property, sales staff, etc. Leased warehouse space costs $3-$10 per square foot depending on quality and location. Retail space like you see in a Borders can be anywhere from $15-$35 or more.
You can often find companies willing to sell select merchandise cheaper, or to undercut prices for a time to gain customers. But unless nerdbooks.com has a special source not available to Amazon, they won't be able to profitably sustain cheaper prices for long. There simply isn't enough profit in the business to do that. Specialty bookstores can do ok if they have a loyal clientèle willing to pay a bit more (maybe in a high priced location like Greenwich, CT) or they provide specialty products/services the big boys don't. But if it is a pure price game it's a losing proposition to compete with Barnes&Noble, Amazon and Borders. They simply have a bigger bankroll and can get the merchandise cheaper than the smaller players.
Yes, there are worse businesses to be in than book sales. I assume that is your point? Airlines, consumer electronics, and several others come to mind. UAL (United Airlines parent company) has gross margins of 14%. Consumer electronics (and I include PCs in that category) is a low-margin cut-throat business. What do books, airplane seats, and PCs have in common? They are all effectively commodities. Anytime you are selling a commodity of any sort, margins are going to be thin unless demand greatly outstrips supply (see oil) for a period of time or there is some other barrier to market entry such as patent protection (see drugs).
That's probably true actually. Starbucks has gross margins of almost 59% which is obscenely high for any company selling a non-software product. While it's probably not an apples to apples comparison, Borders probably does make better margins on their coffee and deserts than on their books. Even outsourcing the operations to a third party there still is enough margin there to make a reasonable profit.
Not really, no. Amazon has gross margins of about 21% and so does Borders. In case that doesn't mean anything to you, 21% gross margin isn't spectacular. That means Amazon and Borders are not making a lot on each sale and there isn't a lot of fat to cut out. Books on Amazon are typically already discounted pretty steeply. Borders doesn't get any economies of scale that aren't also available to Amazon and Borders has physical stores to maintain. Sure, Borders could discount down to zero profit but neither company is likely to do that unless they think they can get some advantage out of it and I can see no advantage for either side in a price war right now.
It's not hard to find specific cases where Windows is cheaper. The problem is when people use specific instances of cheaper TCO using linux or Windows to generalize which one is cheaper for other cases. It is easy to find specific cases where linux is the better option and others where Windows makes more sense. Finding examples however does not answer the question of which is more cost effective in general. I'm not sure there is a good way to answer that other than to assume that companies are rational enterprises and that they will gravitate over time towards to most cost effective solution. Installed base size might be the best available (albeit highly imperfect) measure if you accept the above premise. If linux is growing in market share, that might be rationally construed as evidence that companies are finding the TCO of linux to be lower. It's not the only factor of course but I think it is a reasonable inference.
For the desktop machines in my company which was cheaper depended entirely upon how we used the machines. We ran our servers on SuSE linux but for the desktop machines we needed specific applications where the linux alternatives were sufficiently inferior as to make them not cost effective. For our server needs there was no comparison, linux was vastly more cost effective. TCO is specific to the needs of the organization and/or individuals using the product. Its going to differ on a case by case basis and we would be foolish to generalize our needs to that of the IT community at large.