AOL actually does make real money, just not nearly enough to justify that price. A big dial up ISP throws off a ton of cash, too. Apple can rest easy as long as things just kind of trudge along as they have a mountain of cash that provides lots of funding for small losses. Before interest and taxes (Time Warner does not allocate those expenses to business divisions)AOL made $660 million last year. That's great for a $3-$5 billion dollar business. Goodwill is always a bit wierd, it's how accountants keep the balance sheet balanced when you pay more than book value for a company. Most conservative investors (and bond holders) look at tangible assets and book value excluding things like goodwill and other intangibles. You have to be careful about this because source code, wireless licenses, and Dell's operations are all examples of intangibles that have some value.
The stock market trades mostly on hopes and dreams, especially over the past five years. I blame Microsoft for this. So many people saw Microsoft make people rich who were in early enough, that they bid up the price of every company with the slightest potential of being the next Microsoft. As a result, the demand was met with supply. Enough people did this that the real experts knew values were screwy, but couldn't keep clients if they didn't play the game, too.
Ted's the only vocal one who is and he got booted from the board. I get a kick from the fact that most people who complain about the deal were former AOL shareholders who got half of a pretty decent media company (not that it doesn't have flaws, but it was doing OK) and are complaining that their investments have really declined since the merger.
While they haven't unseated Sony as the market leader (and Nintendo will probably always have the niche of younger oriented games). The X-Box certainly exceeded most expectations for unit sales and installed base. They don't have a library of exclusive games yet, but third party developers are beginning to take a second look at them. This is a huge improvement from their introduction when the XBox was expected to bomb miserably. Their success in online gaming is a huge part of the second looks from developers. Personally, I'm looking forward to Jade Empire, and have bought several games for my own box.
Not bad for the first successful limited PC. Compare this to Larry's NIC, the PC JR, Audrey, WebTV, and the other failed limited use PCs. This was the test unit, the next will establish the platform, and the third version is highly likely to replace the PC as the main development platform (expect a home version of software assurance.
Console gaming finally caught the PC (at least mainstream-non gamer PCs) and became the big market for cutting edge games in the current cycle. A big result of this is the transition from an industry that could be changed by a few folk working out of a garage to a business that reqires significant investmetn (and as a result much lower risk of failure than gaming has historically been).
I've been very happy with IBM's perhiphrials as well. MS brands some excellent stuff, but all of the majors (except maybe Logitech) outsource everything. IBM sold most of these business to Lexmark (who was licensed the brand for a certain period) but Lexmark focused on printers in the late 90s and sold or stopped work on the few products they were still making at that point. Anything from IBM is from one of the big asian ODMs, with IBM's logo slapped on the box.
I've been there, not much else to see in Eastern Washington (unless you like basalt and sage--which I happen to) and it is pretty impressive. I missed the museum, it was closed when we arrived and were headed to Portland on a fairly tight timing. The Stonehenge replica is very neat. I was intrigued by how it could was made with only ancient tools. I think the ancients were a whole lot more resourseful than we give them credit for being.
They haven't needed cash to invest in growth for more than 15 years. Even if you subtract their stock repurchases (really an operating expense as that is pay for their programmers and management) they haven't needed as much cash as the business generates for more than 10 years. Also, their ability to produce additional cash through investments leaves something to be desired. Windows, Office, Server tools, and bonds are the only cash generating (over their lifetime) businesses they have. Guess what the only one that is getting additional funding is the bond business.
You were probably being facetous, but back in the day one of his first venture investments was in Compaq, which paid a dividend prior to their acquisition by HP. HP, of course pays a dividend as well. Pretty sad that you have to go back to his first venture investments (in 1980 to find a dividend paying company). Intuit could afford to and will likely begin to pay a dividend in the next few years.
s/summer/Christmas and yes they will increase as the industry "matures." Hopefully, there will still be some innovators who like Pixar build something good from the ground up.
I would wholeheartedly agree with this thought, reading with young children is probably the most important thing you can do with them to foster learning. I think it does several things, first it showers attention on them in a postive way. It also puts reading in a postive light (since you are the world to them and you are doing it). Finally, they begin reading earlier and are more comfortable with reading when they reach school age. Which makes the first years a breeze, beginning a virtuous cycle of praise (since they understand the other things), followed by learning, followed by success and more praise. This all makes school a postive experience which pushes them to achive even more.
A whole lot of folks think that they need both halves of a couple to work, however in many cases (obviously not all cases) one partner would actually do better staying home. If you make a strictly economic decision (some people prefer work to home, that's a different case), you will want to compare the full opportunity costs of working.
Several areas of great savings through not working are child care, commuting, extra vehicles, food preparation costs, income taxes, and wardrobe costs. It's fairly common for the savings in these areas to be much larger than the second income. However, to achive these savings requires that a "workweek" be put in by the at home spouse (cooking, shopping (checking for sales), and caring for the children. It's worth it for people to at least look at the potential for savings.
If work is an escape from the rigors of the house, it might do to try some alternative careers. The lady who cut my hair as a child worked out of a studio in her spare bedroom. Another potental is through a home sales thing that takes place evenings/weekends (Avon or Tupperware or something similar).
It varies from company to company, but most tech companies are pretty open about things like revenue sources (by industry or product or whatever). As an example, most insutry folk guessed that google had revenue of about $1 billion, but now everyone knows that they have about 600m in self advertising, $200 million in network advertising (those google style text ads on other pages), and $50 million in revenue from those corporate network searching Google boxes. They also know that margins have been declining over the past few years, but that revenue is growing at about a 100% annual clip. Once they are public they will have to do some selling of their performance to owners and analysts, which are generally availible on a public company's web page. In those they are usually questioned about successes and failures over the past three months, and even the most secretive company has to answer a few, or everyone figures they are making results up and the stock tanks.
Cargill might be that big (I'd guess more like $20 billion, outside of farmers no one really hears about them because they dont really care to have you know about them much less how big they are. Some of the bigger law firms and other partnerships in the country might be that big. Think along the lines of specialized business services, since to be that big you have to be national, and we would know about them if the sold goods to average folk.
Usually private comapnies are undervalued compared to public companies so it is worth going public (as your company will be much more valuable (at the cost of quite a bit of information disclosure). Go read a 10-K and proxy for a company some time, they usually tell you quite a bit about their operations, income, assets, strategy, and other things. As a result companies that remain private, they do so to retain a signficant amount of secracy regarding their operations and other activities.
They spent the vast majority of that cash over 2003 and 2004. Look in their cash flow statement under capital expenditures. Figure most of the 50 million building was over the recent years, but it was somehting like 80 million in 2002, 200+ in 2003 and 60-80 so far in 2004. I am going by memory (read the thing on Thurs).
This is very similar to Hollywood's maturity from the 30s and 40s to modern day. In the early days of movies, there were lot's of studios and movies were cranked out because they were cheap to produce. Later as budgets became larger, the more successful studios began buying up the smaller studios until only a few big distribution comapnies exist today. As video game budgets increase similar things will happen. Of course, just as Blair Witch gets made for a few thousand there will be occasional game titles that catapult new developers to the big leagues, but they will more than likely do it with the assistance of one of the bigger names.
Why won't we as a society admit that we drive what WalMart does? It's not like they force people to buy their stuff, they were better at tracking what consumers what and giving it to them. I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg now, but Wal~Mart used to be a little country store that invested in those computer thingies and found that they were pretty useful for telling what sold and what did not. Then they started buying more of what was selling and got rid of the stuff that was not. It's the American consumer that wants cheap sucky stuff built by child and slave laborers and does not give a crap about the status of the employee ringing up their purchase. Do not blame WalMart for our faults.
Google and the Underwriters can cancel or reduce or put on allocation any bid, so if MS were to bid $10 billion for the stake, and the next highest bidder was bidding half that the comapny could pass up to 5000 shares to each of the successful bidders. The price usually set to that of the lowest successful bidder. It's not a true dutch auction, more of a reverse auction. Dutch auctions are much better at getting full value out of biddees, but open up possiblities for manipulation that our public markets don't handle well.
There is something wierd in the tax rate (it was well above 66%), I think they might have some odd reporting regarding stock compensation and its tax effects. Look at operating income and cash from operations, both were in line with your expectations. I was shocked by their captal spending in 2003, and this quarter. They really are buying hardware for Gmail, 270 million last year and 90 million this quarter. 75% of plant is IT assets, that's a crapload of computers.
If he sells he has to trade 1 share of his 10 votes per share stock for 1 share of our 1 vote per share stock, better to let some post IPO options vest and hang on to the super voting stock. Lockups are generally 6 mo or 1 yr, but can be negotiated with the underwriters. You could buy puts on Yahoo and AskJeeves (a common hedging technique for IPO locked shares) if you were that worried about it.
No it was Wall Streeted. There are a whole lot of folks who have been awaiting this (as the deadline for filing private company financials is tomorrow.
It's a heat pump (air conditioner that can be reversed to function as a heater that buries its external heat exchanger (the ground is a relativly stable 55-60F mass) which allows both processes to be tuned to pour heat into or take it from that temperature. The technolgy is pretty neat, well I think it is anyway, your cold mud would have to be a bit more solid to work well.
I'm curious does anyone know how much electric generation is accomplished by burning oil? Is it above 10%, seems like sort of a waste, but I don't understand why we don't all have ground source or geothermal heat pumps.
You see, that patent has expired, (and gone to live in the old patent home where folks will page through it in 100 years and laugh at our stupidity). We needed a shiny new patent for this idea.
There was a story yesterday about TurboLinux new distribution which includes, along with other media related things, a copy of PowerDVD. I'm not sure if it is actually availible for purchase, but it will allow licensed playing of DVDs.
I don't think it's all regulations and import duties. In the computing world exchange rates moved very rapidly and prices did not adjust as quickly at rates moved. The move was big enough (almost 50% in two years) that Germans were importing (paying the import and transit costs) and saving 10-20% on new Mercedes-Benzes from the US. Exchange rates are hedged by most companies so they don't regularly adjust prices for exchange rate fluctuations.
Actually a bunch of those exceedingly cheap DVD players that were so popular the past two Christmases were partly cheap because they also skipped out on the license payment. China didn't care, and avoiding the license in the future is a major reason that China is pushing for their own video standard for internal use.
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AOL actually does make real money, just not nearly enough to justify that price. A big dial up ISP throws off a ton of cash, too. Apple can rest easy as long as things just kind of trudge along as they have a mountain of cash that provides lots of funding for small losses. Before interest and taxes (Time Warner does not allocate those expenses to business divisions)AOL made $660 million last year. That's great for a $3-$5 billion dollar business.
Goodwill is always a bit wierd, it's how accountants keep the balance sheet balanced when you pay more than book value for a company. Most conservative investors (and bond holders) look at tangible assets and book value excluding things like goodwill and other intangibles. You have to be careful about this because source code, wireless licenses, and Dell's operations are all examples of intangibles that have some value.
The stock market trades mostly on hopes and dreams, especially over the past five years. I blame Microsoft for this. So many people saw Microsoft make people rich who were in early enough, that they bid up the price of every company with the slightest potential of being the next Microsoft. As a result, the demand was met with supply. Enough people did this that the real experts knew values were screwy, but couldn't keep clients if they didn't play the game, too.
Ted's the only vocal one who is and he got booted from the board. I get a kick from the fact that most people who complain about the deal were former AOL shareholders who got half of a pretty decent media company (not that it doesn't have flaws, but it was doing OK) and are complaining that their investments have really declined since the merger.
While they haven't unseated Sony as the market leader (and Nintendo will probably always have the niche of younger oriented games). The X-Box certainly exceeded most expectations for unit sales and installed base. They don't have a library of exclusive games yet, but third party developers are beginning to take a second look at them. This is a huge improvement from their introduction when the XBox was expected to bomb miserably. Their success in online gaming is a huge part of the second looks from developers. Personally, I'm looking forward to Jade Empire, and have bought several games for my own box.
Not bad for the first successful limited PC. Compare this to Larry's NIC, the PC JR, Audrey, WebTV, and the other failed limited use PCs. This was the test unit, the next will establish the platform, and the third version is highly likely to replace the PC as the main development platform (expect a home version of software assurance.
Console gaming finally caught the PC (at least mainstream-non gamer PCs) and became the big market for cutting edge games in the current cycle. A big result of this is the transition from an industry that could be changed by a few folk working out of a garage to a business that reqires significant investmetn (and as a result much lower risk of failure than gaming has historically been).
I've been very happy with IBM's perhiphrials as well. MS brands some excellent stuff, but all of the majors (except maybe Logitech) outsource everything. IBM sold most of these business to Lexmark (who was licensed the brand for a certain period) but Lexmark focused on printers in the late 90s and sold or stopped work on the few products they were still making at that point. Anything from IBM is from one of the big asian ODMs, with IBM's logo slapped on the box.
I've been there, not much else to see in Eastern Washington (unless you like basalt and sage--which I happen to) and it is pretty impressive. I missed the museum, it was closed when we arrived and were headed to Portland on a fairly tight timing. The Stonehenge replica is very neat. I was intrigued by how it could was made with only ancient tools. I think the ancients were a whole lot more resourseful than we give them credit for being.
They haven't needed cash to invest in growth for more than 15 years. Even if you subtract their stock repurchases (really an operating expense as that is pay for their programmers and management) they haven't needed as much cash as the business generates for more than 10 years. Also, their ability to produce additional cash through investments leaves something to be desired. Windows, Office, Server tools, and bonds are the only cash generating (over their lifetime) businesses they have. Guess what the only one that is getting additional funding is the bond business.
You were probably being facetous, but back in the day one of his first venture investments was in Compaq, which paid a dividend prior to their acquisition by HP. HP, of course pays a dividend as well. Pretty sad that you have to go back to his first venture investments (in 1980 to find a dividend paying company). Intuit could afford to and will likely begin to pay a dividend in the next few years.
s/summer/Christmas and yes they will increase as the industry "matures." Hopefully, there will still be some innovators who like Pixar build something good from the ground up.
I would wholeheartedly agree with this thought, reading with young children is probably the most important thing you can do with them to foster learning. I think it does several things, first it showers attention on them in a postive way. It also puts reading in a postive light (since you are the world to them and you are doing it). Finally, they begin reading earlier and are more comfortable with reading when they reach school age. Which makes the first years a breeze, beginning a virtuous cycle of praise (since they understand the other things), followed by learning, followed by success and more praise. This all makes school a postive experience which pushes them to achive even more.
A whole lot of folks think that they need both halves of a couple to work, however in many cases (obviously not all cases) one partner would actually do better staying home. If you make a strictly economic decision (some people prefer work to home, that's a different case), you will want to compare the full opportunity costs of working.
Several areas of great savings through not working are child care, commuting, extra vehicles, food preparation costs, income taxes, and wardrobe costs. It's fairly common for the savings in these areas to be much larger than the second income. However, to achive these savings requires that a "workweek" be put in by the at home spouse (cooking, shopping (checking for sales), and caring for the children. It's worth it for people to at least look at the potential for savings.
If work is an escape from the rigors of the house, it might do to try some alternative careers. The lady who cut my hair as a child worked out of a studio in her spare bedroom. Another potental is through a home sales thing that takes place evenings/weekends (Avon or Tupperware or something similar).
It varies from company to company, but most tech companies are pretty open about things like revenue sources (by industry or product or whatever). As an example, most insutry folk guessed that google had revenue of about $1 billion, but now everyone knows that they have about 600m in self advertising, $200 million in network advertising (those google style text ads on other pages), and $50 million in revenue from those corporate network searching Google boxes. They also know that margins have been declining over the past few years, but that revenue is growing at about a 100% annual clip. Once they are public they will have to do some selling of their performance to owners and analysts, which are generally availible on a public company's web page. In those they are usually questioned about successes and failures over the past three months, and even the most secretive company has to answer a few, or everyone figures they are making results up and the stock tanks.
Cargill might be that big (I'd guess more like $20 billion, outside of farmers no one really hears about them because they dont really care to have you know about them much less how big they are. Some of the bigger law firms and other partnerships in the country might be that big. Think along the lines of specialized business services, since to be that big you have to be national, and we would know about them if the sold goods to average folk.
Usually private comapnies are undervalued compared to public companies so it is worth going public (as your company will be much more valuable (at the cost of quite a bit of information disclosure). Go read a 10-K and proxy for a company some time, they usually tell you quite a bit about their operations, income, assets, strategy, and other things. As a result companies that remain private, they do so to retain a signficant amount of secracy regarding their operations and other activities.
They spent the vast majority of that cash over 2003 and 2004. Look in their cash flow statement under capital expenditures. Figure most of the 50 million building was over the recent years, but it was somehting like 80 million in 2002, 200+ in 2003 and 60-80 so far in 2004. I am going by memory (read the thing on Thurs).
This is very similar to Hollywood's maturity from the 30s and 40s to modern day. In the early days of movies, there were lot's of studios and movies were cranked out because they were cheap to produce. Later as budgets became larger, the more successful studios began buying up the smaller studios until only a few big distribution comapnies exist today. As video game budgets increase similar things will happen. Of course, just as Blair Witch gets made for a few thousand there will be occasional game titles that catapult new developers to the big leagues, but they will more than likely do it with the assistance of one of the bigger names.
Why won't we as a society admit that we drive what WalMart does? It's not like they force people to buy their stuff, they were better at tracking what consumers what and giving it to them. I realize this is a bit of a chicken and egg now, but Wal~Mart used to be a little country store that invested in those computer thingies and found that they were pretty useful for telling what sold and what did not. Then they started buying more of what was selling and got rid of the stuff that was not. It's the American consumer that wants cheap sucky stuff built by child and slave laborers and does not give a crap about the status of the employee ringing up their purchase. Do not blame WalMart for our faults.
Google and the Underwriters can cancel or reduce or put on allocation any bid, so if MS were to bid $10 billion for the stake, and the next highest bidder was bidding half that the comapny could pass up to 5000 shares to each of the successful bidders. The price usually set to that of the lowest successful bidder. It's not a true dutch auction, more of a reverse auction. Dutch auctions are much better at getting full value out of biddees, but open up possiblities for manipulation that our public markets don't handle well.
There is something wierd in the tax rate (it was well above 66%), I think they might have some odd reporting regarding stock compensation and its tax effects. Look at operating income and cash from operations, both were in line with your expectations. I was shocked by their captal spending in 2003, and this quarter. They really are buying hardware for Gmail, 270 million last year and 90 million this quarter. 75% of plant is IT assets, that's a crapload of computers.
If he sells he has to trade 1 share of his 10 votes per share stock for 1 share of our 1 vote per share stock, better to let some post IPO options vest and hang on to the super voting stock. Lockups are generally 6 mo or 1 yr, but can be negotiated with the underwriters. You could buy puts on Yahoo and AskJeeves (a common hedging technique for IPO locked shares) if you were that worried about it.
No it was Wall Streeted. There are a whole lot of folks who have been awaiting this (as the deadline for filing private company financials is tomorrow.
It's a heat pump (air conditioner that can be reversed to function as a heater that buries its external heat exchanger (the ground is a relativly stable 55-60F mass) which allows both processes to be tuned to pour heat into or take it from that temperature. The technolgy is pretty neat, well I think it is anyway, your cold mud would have to be a bit more solid to work well.
I'm curious does anyone know how much electric generation is accomplished by burning oil? Is it above 10%, seems like sort of a waste, but I don't understand why we don't all have ground source or geothermal heat pumps.
You see, that patent has expired, (and gone to live in the old patent home where folks will page through it in 100 years and laugh at our stupidity). We needed a shiny new patent for this idea.
There was a story yesterday about TurboLinux new distribution which includes, along with other media related things, a copy of PowerDVD. I'm not sure if it is actually availible for purchase, but it will allow licensed playing of DVDs.
I don't think it's all regulations and import duties. In the computing world exchange rates moved very rapidly and prices did not adjust as quickly at rates moved. The move was big enough (almost 50% in two years) that Germans were importing (paying the import and transit costs) and saving 10-20% on new Mercedes-Benzes from the US. Exchange rates are hedged by most companies so they don't regularly adjust prices for exchange rate fluctuations.
Actually a bunch of those exceedingly cheap DVD players that were so popular the past two Christmases were partly cheap because they also skipped out on the license payment. China didn't care, and avoiding the license in the future is a major reason that China is pushing for their own video standard for internal use.