The company will get a new shiny 5 letter ticker, and will trade on the pink sheets (home to Cadbury, Nestle, Mitsubishi (not the bank), Samsung) and other big relativly safe foreign companies as well as tiny insanly risky domestic stocks. The one unifying feature of trading on the pink sheets is that you do not have to meet SEC filing requirements (which is a feature for the small companies) the big foreign companies usually meet a similar level of disclosure although the accounting rules can differ from domestic ones.
This is likely due to the very high costs of becoming Sarbanes-Oxley complient and if they do not need to why spend the money. Big fund holders are unlikely to sell due to this change, since there will still be liquidity enough to allow them to trade.
I used to work for a pension fund and the funniest piece of research was a chart breaking the population down between the two proposed bundle carriers (voice video internet) 30% hated the phone company and would switch to the cable company under any circumstances, 15% would go to the cable company for the bundle if it were cheaper, 10% couldn't decide, 15% would go to the phone company if it were cheaper, and 30% hated the cable company and would switch to the phone company under any circumstances.
More interestingly was the relativly small number of people who would switch if there were a 1-3 hour battery attached to the phone (allowing use in a power outage.
While I'm doubtful that there will be more x86 macs sold than HP sells systems retail chips is a fairly small portion of the overall chip business and it is a very fragmented market. If one customer buys 50 chips from the retail channel annually I'd be surprised.
If Dell made $50 on a $1300 machine I'd be shocked (even after all the free software gets installed). I think estimates for Dell's consumer hardware business margins were slimmer than Wal-Mart's. The trick is both sell that low margin item a whole lot of times. Also, dell gets better operating margins on their business systems and servers.
Neither breaks R&D by business line, but IBM spent $15.3 billion from 2002-2004 on R&D (keep in mind that IBMs R&D includes lots of software and probably at least a little bit for their computing systems). Intel spent just over $12.5 billion at the same time, but their R&D was only spent on CPU, chipsets, and their network/wireless businesses (which were only a small portion of the R&D spend.
Finance majors should be spreadsheet jockeys, they should be the ones teaching the Excel class teacher how to use some obscure feature in Excel. They shouldn't even have to think about how to calc a percent of a list; they should be able to recite at least two different ways to do this. What would you think of a coder who asked if there was a hello world library on their first day of class?
If you are ever evaluating a finance person give them a system with Excel open and a short list of tasks, if they touch the mouse choose someone else. When I was in full game form, we used to swap keystrokes to paste special: values or formats without touching the mouse because it was too slow.
You have no idea how many people we called on the east coast who thought Montana was in Canada, we actually got in arguements with several who thought we should be calling their international rather than domestic line.
My understanding was that he tended to get plenty ripped when the time came as well. Americans tend to prefer their heroes have flaws, they can identify with them more easily. We're so competitive, we see a hero with no visible flaws and dislike not being able to measure up in some way.
Fantasy baseball leagues, where you can be the manager requires a fairly large stream of stats to operate, MLB wants to get their fingers in the relativly large (and very dedicated business that they missed out on previously.
It's actually the sugar lobby that is to blame. Due to a quota on sugar imports to the US we pay something between double and triple the world price for sugar. At that price, corn based sweeteners become cheaper than sugar.
If I recall correctly several vendors got burned pretty badly by AMD not having their fabs up and running quickly enough. Back when Intel played hard ball, you remember AST and notice their conspicuous absence today. They were relying on AMD to supply them chips in volume. That sort of thing kept the big box makers from using AMD as anything other than a value chip/keep intel honest at the low end for about a decade. It doesn't hurt that Dell has been exclusive Intel for decades, and now sells the highest volume of PCs in the US.
They probably got multiple entrance tickets (perhaps 2-4) $22-$44/hour is a much better leasure time rate. You should know yourself enough to ensure that you won't be sucked in by a very high pressure sale.
Competition is great but this is an example of the classic market failures. A format is little more than a platform for doing something else, as such there are tremendous network effects (the platform is more valuable the more people who use it). Other examples of this are telephone systems, operating systems, etc. The winner could be complete crap, but because it became the popular choice switching costs are exceedingly high (you have to create or transition your content if it is even possible). Businesses have learned that one of the most rapid meathods to unrivaled success is to own or control a platform. AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, eBay and Google, all owned a platform that benefited from network effects and all zipped from startup to massive and exceedingly sucessful company at unrivaled speeds.
Format wars are more costly as the utility expands exponentially with users or content. The monopoly rents are tolerable, because the added content or utility available from a single source far outweighs the monopoly rents paid for access. AT&T may have charged a fortune for long distance, but for many people the call they were making was worth far more.
Drawn out format wars can be costly enough that the technology is ignored or forgotten espeically when there are more than two competitors. Look at the codecs on the net. How many times have you not watched a video because you couldn't seem to find the correct codec? Or how much software migrated to Windows during the incompatible unix varients era?
I'm no chemist, but as I understand it laundry detergent/washing powerder is basically just a water softening agent. Soft water is a better solevant and removes foreign particles from your clothing better than hard water.
XAU is actually an index of precious metal mining companies, which have many complications beyond the price of gold: environmental regulations, co-mined metal prices, mining labor costs, availability of other inputs (like big industrial tires). Looking at just gold prices, they have gone up for the past 4 years, chart here. Gold is a very conservative investment, it's goal is not so much to provide returns but hedge against major risks (hyperinflation, financial panic, governmental failure, etc). In modern times the US Dollar has adopted that role for many people, but it has shown some cracks as it aged, so the more pessimistic among us have shifted to gold. In any case, he's probably staying ahead of medical costs (and doing better than highly liquid bond investments).
If you were to keep bills they would provide no protection against a deductible increase or decrease. Beginning today let's presume a medical procedure requires 10 man hours of time for exam, lab, and billing and the doctor's average cost is $100/hr in 2005. Using an extreme example of inflating costs to $200/hr in the near future, 50 $100 bills would only cover half the "value" of the deductible, but 10 oz of gold would have increased in value perhaps to something near 100 $100 bills in the future.
Generally, the only major compatability issue with PCs is the processor socket (ram is important, too but the standards are time based rather than company based). There are only about 5 sockets your CPU must match your motherboard. Newegg.com lets you search both motherboards and processors by socket type (they are measured by number of pins).
Most folks stick to watches, fake handbags, and "solid gold" jewelry (that oddly turns their skin green in a few days), but I'm sure there are venders sellling laptops and other electronics.
But they can only supply a few people, let us imagine that 1.5 million folks want an X-Box at USD 300 (between now and Christmas), but MS will only be able to produce 0.75 million. Perhaps only 0.75 million are interested at USD 600, or USD 300 and 12 hr wait (note that the two groups are probably not either mutually inclusive or exclusive). The second problem is one of distribution, since the units were distributed in small amounts to different retailers at different times, additional resources (fuel, time, sales people) are wasted as a portion of the buyers search for the last fraction of X-Boxes. Added to this are the resources wasted chasing rumors of supply in other locations. As well as the extra risk and risk mitigation brought on by reports of X-Box theft etc. The lone group made better off in this senario are those who have a low value on their time (and would have been priced out of the $600 x-box market). They will sell the X-Box for a profit to a high value buyer and a better rate than their next marginal use of time. This seems like a very inefficient way to subsidize a marginal customer with a low value on their time.
What the gp is referring to is that your system is far more powerful, but much less specialized. You have a much higher overhead for the OS and developers are less able to leverage all the features in your system as they would be able to do in a standardized console. Also the design of your system is a balance between several competing goals (someone could build a similar system for simulations, factoring, gaming, and other functions, while the X-Box is just for gaming. While an M5 has more seating capacity and comfort as well as probably more displacement and horsepower than a Porsche 959, and is a far better car for everyone but the driver. I know which one I'm betting on to post the shortest time around the Nurburgring.
In the article he mentions using an auction to sell the initial allocations, which is effectivly what happened except the bidding was done through waiting in line the night before the sale (which makes no one any money). MS could just as easily have announce that all produciton through Christmas would be sold at auction but in 2006 the price will be set to $300/$400 or some other price. Effectivly most consumers expect consoles to be sold in a Dutch auction format (wait long enough and it will eventually fall to $99 or less). So this would not have been a huge change from the norm.
Having a monopoly (or even market power) isn't illegal. Attempts to monopolize are illegal. If ebay were listing fraud auctions at Amazon or Yahoo!, you would have an anti-trust case against them, or if they forbid (and enforced) requirements that registered users or powersellers were not allowed to list at a competitor you might have a case, but until they attempt to monoplize the online auction industry (the DOJ might define the business as online retail in which case no real market power) there is not an anti-trust case.
Ebay is more like the mall, some of the stores are close to store #1, others are more like store #2. Both stores seem to stay in business, sugesting that some people like high touch service retail (Nordstroms & Tiffany's) while others prefer the "bargains" of Canal St.
The trick with the money order scam is that they clear, but a few weeks later the money order is proved fraudulent (and the money is withdrawn. It was a big scam in dead tree classifieds, as well. Be cautious of money orders drawn on no-name foreign banks (ABN, UBS and the like are no different than BoA or Citi) from areas where paper processing is still done.
You should have to pay them back at full retail for the amount of the iPods and plasmas you took. Plus a kicker to the state for having to round your loopy butt up.
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The company will get a new shiny 5 letter ticker, and will trade on the pink sheets (home to Cadbury, Nestle, Mitsubishi (not the bank), Samsung) and other big relativly safe foreign companies as well as tiny insanly risky domestic stocks. The one unifying feature of trading on the pink sheets is that you do not have to meet SEC filing requirements (which is a feature for the small companies) the big foreign companies usually meet a similar level of disclosure although the accounting rules can differ from domestic ones. This is likely due to the very high costs of becoming Sarbanes-Oxley complient and if they do not need to why spend the money. Big fund holders are unlikely to sell due to this change, since there will still be liquidity enough to allow them to trade.
I used to work for a pension fund and the funniest piece of research was a chart breaking the population down between the two proposed bundle carriers (voice video internet) 30% hated the phone company and would switch to the cable company under any circumstances, 15% would go to the cable company for the bundle if it were cheaper, 10% couldn't decide, 15% would go to the phone company if it were cheaper, and 30% hated the cable company and would switch to the phone company under any circumstances.
More interestingly was the relativly small number of people who would switch if there were a 1-3 hour battery attached to the phone (allowing use in a power outage.
While I'm doubtful that there will be more x86 macs sold than HP sells systems retail chips is a fairly small portion of the overall chip business and it is a very fragmented market. If one customer buys 50 chips from the retail channel annually I'd be surprised.
If Dell made $50 on a $1300 machine I'd be shocked (even after all the free software gets installed). I think estimates for Dell's consumer hardware business margins were slimmer than Wal-Mart's. The trick is both sell that low margin item a whole lot of times. Also, dell gets better operating margins on their business systems and servers.
Neither breaks R&D by business line, but IBM spent $15.3 billion from 2002-2004 on R&D (keep in mind that IBMs R&D includes lots of software and probably at least a little bit for their computing systems). Intel spent just over $12.5 billion at the same time, but their R&D was only spent on CPU, chipsets, and their network/wireless businesses (which were only a small portion of the R&D spend.
Finance majors should be spreadsheet jockeys, they should be the ones teaching the Excel class teacher how to use some obscure feature in Excel. They shouldn't even have to think about how to calc a percent of a list; they should be able to recite at least two different ways to do this. What would you think of a coder who asked if there was a hello world library on their first day of class?
If you are ever evaluating a finance person give them a system with Excel open and a short list of tasks, if they touch the mouse choose someone else. When I was in full game form, we used to swap keystrokes to paste special: values or formats without touching the mouse because it was too slow.
You have no idea how many people we called on the east coast who thought Montana was in Canada, we actually got in arguements with several who thought we should be calling their international rather than domestic line.
Slashdot's crack squad of copy editing penguins. Here they are hard at workagain.
FYI, the linked page has a flash game if you care about such things.
My understanding was that he tended to get plenty ripped when the time came as well. Americans tend to prefer their heroes have flaws, they can identify with them more easily. We're so competitive, we see a hero with no visible flaws and dislike not being able to measure up in some way.
Fantasy baseball leagues, where you can be the manager requires a fairly large stream of stats to operate, MLB wants to get their fingers in the relativly large (and very dedicated business that they missed out on previously.
It's actually the sugar lobby that is to blame. Due to a quota on sugar imports to the US we pay something between double and triple the world price for sugar. At that price, corn based sweeteners become cheaper than sugar.
If I recall correctly several vendors got burned pretty badly by AMD not having their fabs up and running quickly enough. Back when Intel played hard ball, you remember AST and notice their conspicuous absence today. They were relying on AMD to supply them chips in volume. That sort of thing kept the big box makers from using AMD as anything other than a value chip/keep intel honest at the low end for about a decade. It doesn't hurt that Dell has been exclusive Intel for decades, and now sells the highest volume of PCs in the US.
They probably got multiple entrance tickets (perhaps 2-4) $22-$44/hour is a much better leasure time rate. You should know yourself enough to ensure that you won't be sucked in by a very high pressure sale.
Competition is great but this is an example of the classic market failures. A format is little more than a platform for doing something else, as such there are tremendous network effects (the platform is more valuable the more people who use it). Other examples of this are telephone systems, operating systems, etc. The winner could be complete crap, but because it became the popular choice switching costs are exceedingly high (you have to create or transition your content if it is even possible). Businesses have learned that one of the most rapid meathods to unrivaled success is to own or control a platform. AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, eBay and Google, all owned a platform that benefited from network effects and all zipped from startup to massive and exceedingly sucessful company at unrivaled speeds.
Format wars are more costly as the utility expands exponentially with users or content. The monopoly rents are tolerable, because the added content or utility available from a single source far outweighs the monopoly rents paid for access. AT&T may have charged a fortune for long distance, but for many people the call they were making was worth far more.
Drawn out format wars can be costly enough that the technology is ignored or forgotten espeically when there are more than two competitors. Look at the codecs on the net. How many times have you not watched a video because you couldn't seem to find the correct codec? Or how much software migrated to Windows during the incompatible unix varients era?
I'm no chemist, but as I understand it laundry detergent/washing powerder is basically just a water softening agent. Soft water is a better solevant and removes foreign particles from your clothing better than hard water.
XAU is actually an index of precious metal mining companies, which have many complications beyond the price of gold: environmental regulations, co-mined metal prices, mining labor costs, availability of other inputs (like big industrial tires). Looking at just gold prices, they have gone up for the past 4 years, chart here. Gold is a very conservative investment, it's goal is not so much to provide returns but hedge against major risks (hyperinflation, financial panic, governmental failure, etc). In modern times the US Dollar has adopted that role for many people, but it has shown some cracks as it aged, so the more pessimistic among us have shifted to gold. In any case, he's probably staying ahead of medical costs (and doing better than highly liquid bond investments).
If you were to keep bills they would provide no protection against a deductible increase or decrease. Beginning today let's presume a medical procedure requires 10 man hours of time for exam, lab, and billing and the doctor's average cost is $100/hr in 2005. Using an extreme example of inflating costs to $200/hr in the near future, 50 $100 bills would only cover half the "value" of the deductible, but 10 oz of gold would have increased in value perhaps to something near 100 $100 bills in the future.
Generally, the only major compatability issue with PCs is the processor socket (ram is important, too but the standards are time based rather than company based). There are only about 5 sockets your CPU must match your motherboard. Newegg.com lets you search both motherboards and processors by socket type (they are measured by number of pins).
Most folks stick to watches, fake handbags, and "solid gold" jewelry (that oddly turns their skin green in a few days), but I'm sure there are venders sellling laptops and other electronics.
But they can only supply a few people, let us imagine that 1.5 million folks want an X-Box at USD 300 (between now and Christmas), but MS will only be able to produce 0.75 million. Perhaps only 0.75 million are interested at USD 600, or USD 300 and 12 hr wait (note that the two groups are probably not either mutually inclusive or exclusive). The second problem is one of distribution, since the units were distributed in small amounts to different retailers at different times, additional resources (fuel, time, sales people) are wasted as a portion of the buyers search for the last fraction of X-Boxes. Added to this are the resources wasted chasing rumors of supply in other locations. As well as the extra risk and risk mitigation brought on by reports of X-Box theft etc. The lone group made better off in this senario are those who have a low value on their time (and would have been priced out of the $600 x-box market). They will sell the X-Box for a profit to a high value buyer and a better rate than their next marginal use of time. This seems like a very inefficient way to subsidize a marginal customer with a low value on their time.
What the gp is referring to is that your system is far more powerful, but much less specialized. You have a much higher overhead for the OS and developers are less able to leverage all the features in your system as they would be able to do in a standardized console. Also the design of your system is a balance between several competing goals (someone could build a similar system for simulations, factoring, gaming, and other functions, while the X-Box is just for gaming. While an M5 has more seating capacity and comfort as well as probably more displacement and horsepower than a Porsche 959, and is a far better car for everyone but the driver. I know which one I'm betting on to post the shortest time around the Nurburgring.
In the article he mentions using an auction to sell the initial allocations, which is effectivly what happened except the bidding was done through waiting in line the night before the sale (which makes no one any money). MS could just as easily have announce that all produciton through Christmas would be sold at auction but in 2006 the price will be set to $300/$400 or some other price. Effectivly most consumers expect consoles to be sold in a Dutch auction format (wait long enough and it will eventually fall to $99 or less). So this would not have been a huge change from the norm.
Having a monopoly (or even market power) isn't illegal. Attempts to monopolize are illegal. If ebay were listing fraud auctions at Amazon or Yahoo!, you would have an anti-trust case against them, or if they forbid (and enforced) requirements that registered users or powersellers were not allowed to list at a competitor you might have a case, but until they attempt to monoplize the online auction industry (the DOJ might define the business as online retail in which case no real market power) there is not an anti-trust case.
Ebay is more like the mall, some of the stores are close to store #1, others are more like store #2. Both stores seem to stay in business, sugesting that some people like high touch service retail (Nordstroms & Tiffany's) while others prefer the "bargains" of Canal St.
The trick with the money order scam is that they clear, but a few weeks later the money order is proved fraudulent (and the money is withdrawn. It was a big scam in dead tree classifieds, as well. Be cautious of money orders drawn on no-name foreign banks (ABN, UBS and the like are no different than BoA or Citi) from areas where paper processing is still done.
You should have to pay them back at full retail for the amount of the iPods and plasmas you took. Plus a kicker to the state for having to round your loopy butt up.