ChatGPT & DALL-E 2

It took a while but I managed to get an account. You have to be patient at times because the servers are maxed out. ChatGPT and its sister product DALL-E 2 is amazing and scary at the same time. As in any new technology, comments range from acclamation to criticism. Where do we go from here? Love it or hate it, the genie is out of the bottle. The beast is out. There’s no turning back. We have to adapt and learn how to live with it.

Quick primer. What is ChatGPT & DALL-E 2? They are text-to-image generators that let you type in almost any phrase and get an image or some kind of smart answer. Go check it out. I can spend 5 minutes writing what it’s about, or you can go try it yourself. The “wow” factor is in playing with it, not reading what it is, just like it’s more fun to drive a car than looking at a picture of it. This thing is an assistant, a doctor, a lawyer, a coach, a co-chef, an artist, and an advisor of all sorts. It’s not perfect and it make mistakes, but I’m not perfect either.

A fat American baby eating candies and floating in space.

Both products are creations of OpenAI (wiki). OpenAI is now a for-profit organization. It started as a non-profit in 2015. It was funded by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and others. The business is currently run by Altman. Musk resigned from his board seat in 2018. OpenAI is now backed by Microsoft. The partnership with Microsoft allowed them access to the computing resources it needed to train and improve its artificial intelligence algorithms. Microsoft now wants to incorporate the OpenAI tools in its products. More on this later.

For decades, we’ve been hearing about how AI is going to change how we interact with the world. We see AI in action, mostly in the background, when we use Netflix, our email, when we shop on Amazon. But I think this is the first time we actually use it to create something. It’s the first time most of us recognize it in action. Almost every time I put in a prompt and see what’s returned I’m amazed, entertained and scared, all three combined. 

It had that “feel.” The first time I used the Internet. I knew. I just knew that it was a game changer. Not exactly how, but I knew that it wasn’t just a trend. There was no going back. It’s hilarious to write this, but at the time many experts didn’t think the Internet would live last, or work. I’m serious. Look it up. Or what about when the iPhone came out. You knew it was a game changer. 

Clip from the a 1995 article in Newsweek, Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana

First thoughts on ChatGPT: “Wow this is crazy amazing, and…..Is anybody ever going to do work anymore? Who wants to write papers?”

The technology is fun but full of potential unknowns. And there’s this whole question of ethics (I’ve seen called an “ethical fiasco”). I grew up watching Terminator. My brain wasn’t shaped into thinking about a rosy future about AI robots. What if down the lane the robot overrides its programming and becomes independent? It’s not helping that I’m watching Westworld. In a sense, you can argue that the machines have already won and they didn’t have to fire a shot. We are on our cell phones all the time. 

Back to ChatGPT/DALL-E. New game changing technology creates opportunities and lots of incertitude. There’s no going back. What does it mean for your job? If you are an artist, this is a nightmare. I mean the thing is cranking out poems. If you are not an artist, like me, this is awesome because I don’t have to learn how to use the Adobe slate of products. If you are a copyright lawyer, this is a goldmine. But I’m also worried about what it means for my career in the future. I’ve seen ChatGPT being used for legal advice and it’s not bad.

The current version of ChatGPT is 3.5.  It’s embryonic right now (beta). ChatGPT is more than a flash in the pan. We are in the first inning. It will need to scale. But as it develops, as it races to build it so that it could fully mirror the intelligence and capabilities of humans, who knows what we are getting into.

ChatGPT 4.0 will come out this spring and I heard it will be a massive improvement. And you know this will have 5.0, 6.0….10.0….

And you know the competition, like Google, and mainly Google, is not just sitting around doing nothing. A NYT article reported last month that ChatGPT’s launch triggered Google’s management to declare a “code red” internally (so they had a meeting).

Got it somewhere on Twitter

Search Engine War 2.0

I remember the search engine war of the 90s-early 00s, when you could choose between Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Goto, AskJeeves, and many others? Well Google won (duh). Like crushed it. It now has a monopoly on search. Google killed all the search engines. Who’s in 2nd place? Bing? Nobody says “Let me Bing this up.”

I like Google and its slate of products. It works fine. But maybe it’s time for a little competition. A little shake up, a little pressure, a little there’s something big coming in the rearview mirror called ChatGPT. When you are in 1st place for 20+ years, you can get complacent. It’s just what happens. Google did introduce LaMDA, a rival AI chatbot.

Microsoft, with its Bing search engine, is going all in. Microsoft said it’s expanding access to OpenAI tools. DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, and other AI-powered software will soon become available to Azure OpenAI customers.

It’s early and Google is safe, for now. But as the AI industry takes off, there will likely be a battle between Microsoft and Google. Search engine are a high fixed cost businesses. Once you built the infrastructure, it’s all about scale. Right now, a product like ChatGPT is very computationally intensive. It cost ChatGPT “pennies” per query. Every search is burning cash. It wouldn’t cost or hurt Microsoft much to integrate ChatGPT to Bing because it’s much smaller. But for Google that’s a different story. Search users are very profitable. Deploying ChatGPT like feature (AI tools like Large Language Model (LLM)) is going to be very expensive and eat in their margins, and that’s just to keep market share. And I’m not sure ad revenue would be more profitable (less if you lose market share).

So, at the moment, the economics of deploying LLM isn’t quite there yet. It’s one thing to demo it. It’s another to try to integrate it deeply in a system with billions of request a day. Think of the cost and the latency. Those are two major bottlenecks I read that cost would need to go down at least 10x, or more, before it starts making sense. It will take some time.

Don’t fight the tide, swim with it

AI is a massive wave. Don’t fight the tide. Swim with it. Jobs and lives will be disrupted. Nothing is static forever. You need to adapt. As for artists, maybe it is a chance to use and adopt new tools. Just like they did with the PC, photoshop, and the Internet. Any new technology can be seen as a threat at first. The PC didn’t kill the artist. It probably made the artist better. Lawyers will be better. Doctors will be better. 

Fighting this won’t help. You have to embrace it. Remember when MP3s came out? It did kill the CD industry. But it didn’t kill music. MP3s disrupted music. Some artists were fighting it. In the end who won? The companies that adopted MP3s (Apple/iTunes), artists and the consumers. More music is being created than ever. More music is being consumed than ever.

ChatGPT is a deflationary force in an inflationary economy. What it means for productivity, competitiveness, efficiency is incalculable. Every organization in every industry will need to infuse this sort of AI technology in every business process and function so they can do more with less. It’s what I believe will make the difference between organizations that adopt changes and those that get left behind. There is an opportunity to apply technology to make a real difference has never been greater. You get to leapfrog. Imagine if you have nothing in the middle of nowhere, but you have access to this tool, it’s powerful. It will empower the people at the bottom. It will allow them to achieve more.

I’m not saying I like it. I’m not pro or anti AI. It’s just is. Just like I don’t hate or love steel. I do my have concerns. There’s a lot of incertitude. But that’s mostly because we don’t understand it. There are already books published by ChatGPT. I’m not sure what to make out of that. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to read it.

Or maybe this won’t age well, like the Newsweek article above. I’m just trying to be optimistic.

A bowl of soup that looks like a monster, knitted out of wool.

Quality at the Right Price

In this post, there are two factors that I will address: 1) Quality 2) and Price. In the investment world, there’s a lot of talk about quality and not enough about how much to pay for it. Even though how much you pay for an asset is the biggest factor of your future returns. 

You want to invest in quality businesses at a reasonable price. Overpaying for a quality business is not a quality investment. It’s when you overpay that you get in trouble. Even if you buy the best company in the world, you can lose money if you overpay. Quality is not the equivalent of a good investment. What you pay and what you get in returns is what matters. If the market views a particular stock as a high-quality business, it’s unlikely going to be cheap and it’ll be priced for low returns. So it’s really the search for quality that has been unrecognized or unpriced by the market that’s critical.

The “Quality” Marketing Cliche 

You need to watch out for that “quality” word. You will hear it a lot. It goes without saying that quality is something we seek, whether in people, goods, services, or in investments. But in the investment business the word “quality” has been so over used and diluted that it has become meaningless. So when we seek a quality business, you have to make sure it’s not just another marketing cliche that fund managers put in their presentation.

Investment professionals will often say to just buy “quality”. “You can’t go wrong if you buy high-quality businesses”. “Ignore junk and just focus on quality stocks.” Or “quality companies lose less money in a downturn.” They will also bring up Warren Buffett to justify anything; “Buffett transitioned to quality investing from the cigar butt approach and look at how successful that was.”

You should be wary of broad generalizations like “just buy quality” that oversimplify investing into a certain thing. To focus on quality alone is not bad advice, it’s just incomplete. Quality is a good thing. But it’s good advice to an extent. The problem is not quality, the problem is overpaying for quality. If you go through fancy fund presentations, you can pick out the marketing-cliche beats the managers are trying to hit: “economic moats,” “investment opportunity,” “massive total addressable market,” “barrier to entry”, “scalable platform”. 

But for all the talk surrounding quality, there’s barely any talk about how much to pay for it. And I’m of the opinion we need to think about valuation just as much, if not more, than the time spent on assessing quality.

How to Get in Trouble With Quality

Quality at any price can get you in trouble. The “Nifty Fifty” comes to mind when talking about quality and price. The Nifty Fifty was a group of 50 large-cap stocks in the 1960s that represented the best and fastest growing in America. They became known as “one-decision” stocks. That decision was to buy and let it ride. No price was too high. Buy them and hold them. Like any mania their valuation reached nosebleed level and they eventually crashed. Depending on the stock, if you held them during the crash you would have lost 60%-90% of your money. The sin: Overpaying for quality.

Microsoft is another example of a high quality company. In the 1990s their Windows and Office flagship products were on every computer in the world. Microsoft was a monopoly, made massive amounts of money, and co-founder Bill Gates was the world’s richest man. The future looked bright. The Dotcom bubble took the stock to a different orbit. Then the bubble burst. It took Microsoft 15 years for its share price to come back to their bubble height, despite growing and being profitable every year. The sin: Overpaying for quality.

Another Dotcom high-flier was Cisco. Cisco is another solid business with a high-quality moat around it. Cisco does important things like providing the technology that “makes the Internet work.” It’s been twenty three years since its Dotcom peak and Cisco is still not close to their Dotcom peak despite being profitable every single year. The sin: Overpaying for quality.

Depending on your timing, Microsoft and Cisco are two examples of high-quality companies you could have bought and not make you money for a very long time. Both Cisco and Microsoft were highly profitable (still are), with steady earnings growth and low debt. And yet many people holding them would have been in the red. The price of these stocks got ahead of themselves. Their stocks were so hot that their valuation lost all touch with reality. The mania sent them to levels that were unjustified in relation to their earnings and growth prospects. Investors bidded them up to prices that weren’t sustainable.

You want the price of a security to be cheap relative to its value, to its cash flow, to its assets, to its perceived quality attributes. Buying quality at an extremely high price is not a quality decision. If you pay too much, you will realize that quality is not going to perform as defensively as you think it would. If you overpay, quality doesn’t provide bulletproof performance. There’s limited upside if you overpay.

What is Quality?

What does quality investing really mean? What constitutes a quality business? It’s subjective. It can be vaguely defined. Quality lies in the eye of the beholder as they say. 

So what factors do investors consider that constitute a high-quality stock? It’s a confluence of factors. Some focus on quantitative metrics, such as high return on capital, a low debt ratio, low capital need, steady earnings growth, profitability, and the capacity to generate sustainable free cash flow. Things that you can measure and put a number to it.

There are qualitative factors that are harder to define and to measure. These are things such as the capacity to survive a recession (super resilient business), a long runway for durable growth, high product “stickiness” (e.g. bank account), a strong economic moat, competitive advantage, lack of competition, pricing power, high margins, capital discipline, great capital allocation skills, rich re-investment opportunities, a great enduring brand, economies of scale, and exceptional management. And there’s more.

You recognize quality when you see it. But it can’t always be measured with precision. In a business, quality is a confluence of attributes. My point is you need to study the business and you need to determine what makes it great. Quality can’t just be another tick the box on the checklist and move on without thinking hard about the confluence of attributes that you think make the business great. 

Once you find that high-quality business, the next questions you should ask are 1) How much is it worth? 2) How much am I willing to pay for it? Unfortunately if you do find this gem of a company, it trades at a premium, and sometimes at prices that aren’t sustainable. Only in times of distress high-quality companies trade at bargain levels. This situation usually occurs when there’s a recession, a market crash, or the company has run into some trouble. And when that happens, nobody wants to buy them.

The Price is Right

By now I think I made the point that price is the essential factor in every investment equation. Does quality warrant a price premium? Of course it does. It’s rare to find quality at a cheap price. That’s why I suggest paying a reasonable price for quality. But how much? Well that’s the art of valuation. It’s subjective. Each business needs to be studied on an individual basis.

Any asset no matter how low the quality is, can be cheap enough to be a good investment. At the right price, every asset is a buy. No matter how terrible it is, at the right price it can become a positive investment. And no matter how great the asset is, at the wrong price, you can get in trouble. Any share you buy, you have to ask yourself what you will get in return. You are looking for mismatches, a company that is of great quality that the rest of the world thinks is crappy. That’s what a great investment is.

Since I brought up Warren Buffett earlier to justify anything, I’m going to close this letter with him. Buffett once joked that “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”

Microsoft – Activision Blizzard Deal Thoughts

Disclosure: I am long Activision Blizzard and Microsoft.

Big news in the gaming world. Microsoft (MSFT) agreed to buy Activision Blizzard (ATVI) in an all-cash deal valued at about $75 billion (net of cash $68b), or $95 per share . This is the largest gaming industry acquisition ever, which crushed the previous record established last week when Take Two bought Zynga for $11 billion. The deal is also Microsoft’s biggest ever.

Microsoft offered a 45% premium. This is a hefty premium compared to where ATVI traded in recent months, but ATVI traded at higher prices one year ago (52-week high $104). The recent scandals have hurt ATVI.

At the moment, ATVI trades ~$82 per share. This implies that the market is skeptical that the deal will close. There’s an arbitrage opportunity here. If the deal goes through, it offers a 16% upside. ATVI also distributes a small dividend once a year. Let’s discuss this arbitrage opportunity. .

Disclosure: I am long ATVI and Microsoft. I’ve been a shareholder of both companies before the announcement. I’m pleased with the offer. I’m biased. I don’t see the risk the market does and that’s the issue. It’s not the capacity to pay. Microsoft has the cash and won’t dilute shareholders. So it sounds like possible antitrust issues. Is there anything else I’m missing?

Here’s a brief background on both companies:

Activision Blizzard

It’s no secret that the company behind blockbuster games like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo is going through a rough patch, to say the least. I’m not going to rehash everything that happened (years of sexual harassment, discrimination, and misconduct). But what happened and how it was handled is business/PR 101 on what not to do.

ATVI’s reputation is damaged. Talent is leaving. There’s probably more skeletons in the closet. Bobby Kotick built a great company, great games, and rewarded shareholders very well along the way. But Kotick mismanaged the crisis and lost the trust of the gamers, public, employees, and the market. We don’t have the full story. I suspect more internal problems, more culture and development issues with games. And it’s not just the scandal, ATVI has made some missteps in the past.

The thing is the scandal would have followed the company for a long time. These things don’t go away easily. The media and the Internet will keep bringing up. And if you underperform operationally, game quality and growth is affected, the pressure will just keep going up. Your culture might be so tainted that gamers don’t want to be associated with your games. A crisis like that would have taken years to fix and in the process possibly lose your competitiveness and sales. Who knows if the stock would ever recover.

With this background, I understand why ATVI accepted the $95 cash offer. It’s probably better that ATVI is under a different home. Fix the issues away from the public. It’s been reported that Kotick will leave if and once the deal closes. In a sense it gives him a graceful exit.

Microsoft

Microsoft has been making a lot of deals lately. WSJ reported that MSFT had long been interested in ATVI and had discussed a potential acquisition in the past.

If you are going to spend $75 billion for a business, you have big plans. It’s also telling of their gaming ambitions. For the last ten years MSFT has been boosting their gaming portfolio.

For the last ten years Microsoft has been boosting their gaming assets. Microsoft has been working on building the “Netflix” of gaming. A subscription based cloud gaming service. Cloud gaming is an emerging technology that allows people to stream games via nearly any internet-connected device (issue is that game requires a lot of data to run smoothly). And because Microsoft owns Azure, they have the cloud infrastructure to support such a strategy.

The strategy is to persuade gamers to abandon their expensive hardware and play on the cloud. If Microsoft could convert some of Activision’s close to 400 million monthly active users into subscribers, it could significantly bolster its cloud-game business.

Issues

I believe it comes down to antitrust. But because I’m set to benefit I don’t fully see the risk the market does. John Hempton from Bronte Capital brought up some of the same issues on a thread on Twitter. But I don’t see anything substantial in the Twitter comments. I share some of his views. Here’s what I think and please let me know what I don’t see:

• Is there a precedent where the Gov/Justice Department/FTC blocked a gaming transaction?
• The deal is not expected to close for a while (ATVI Fiscal 2023) but that is still a big gap.
• I think the #1 factor is Lina Khan, the chair of the FTC. She’s been very vocal about taking on big tech. She’s writing papers about. That’s why she got the job. The 32-year-old antitrust scholar and law professor is not Microsoft’s ally.
• This deal poses an important test of the Biden Administration’s generally unfriendly view of large technology acquisitions.
• However, from a regulatory perspective, Microsoft is not under the same level of scrutiny as other big tech (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google).
• Microsoft will pay a $3 billion breakup fee if the deal doesn’t go through. This indicates to me that they are confident the deal will go through.
• The games will need to be on multiple platforms (Playstation, PC, Nintendo, mobile etc…). If not it’s a deal breaker. The deal won’t get approved and you will get a gamer mutiny. And gamers are crazy. 
• Keeping the games multi-platform also makes business sense. If you fence off Call of Duty to only Xbox, you will kill part of the gamer community and hurt the branding. If you pay $75b you want to see some returns at the end of the day.
• If these get hairy they might have to sell a couple titles.
• I don’t think there’s too much concentration. In terms of gaming sales (excluding hardware) Microsoft is #4. Tencent, Sony and Apple have more gaming revenues. ATVI is #7. The deal will make Microsoft the third largest gaming company in terms of revenue.

I think the deal will go through. Let’s hear other views and why (this post is on Twitter).

Brian

So I tried TikTok

I had to figure out what TikTok was. What is it that required the full weight of the Presidency of the United States? Why do the US and other countries want to ban it? Why are the news paying so much attention to it? Why does TikTok even matter? And why Microsoft (MSFT) and Twitter (TWTR) sniffing around?

Before downloading the app I knew that TikTok was a Chinese video-sharing social media app with short videos mostly about music and dancing. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has 60,000 employees in 126 cities. Beside TikTok they have a bunch of other apps that I never heard of. It goes without saying that TikTok is one of the most popular social media app, especially among young people. Despite its rapid rise, there are still plenty of people — often, older people — who aren’t quite sure what TikTok is, including me until recently. It’s kinda of my job to know these things even if I don’t use them. And I’m a parent of two young guys, so maybe I should be concerned with what’s coming.

To give some background, I often create “ghost” accounts just to check things out and I notice that the same patterns recurring. First I don’t get it. I didn’t get Twitter at first and it took like five years before I started using it. I didn’t get Snapchap (SNAP) and still don’t. I didn’t get Reddit and now it’s awesome. I didn’t get Instagram and now I like it better than Facebook (FB). My thinking at first was “why use Instagram when you have Facebook?” Why use WhatsApp when you have Skype? Why have another app that does almost exactly the same thing as the other one? It takes me a while to understand these Internet trends. Now I use WhatsApp and keep Skype for my mom because the hassle and of getting her a new video conference app is not worth it. I use Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and dislike Facebook. And what they hell happened to Facebook? When I got it around 2006 it was just to post drunk pics. Now Facebook is a giant cluttered monster that decides elections results. You can also see FB’s influence on Instagram where they are starting to clutter the whole thing. So yeah social media is the toilet of the Internet and I’m stuck in it.

The Microsoft Millionaires

Latest article on Seeking Alpha. It’s a big success and I received a lot of great comments. In this article I look back at Microsoft and how much money it made for its shareholders.

Here’s a preview. For the full article you can read it directly on Seeking Alpha here (free).

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Reposted from Seeking Alpha
By Brian Langis

Summary

• Microsoft is a 791-bagger since its IPO in 1986.
• Is there a company that created more millionaires and billionaires?
• Satya Nadella is reinventing the company. Provides vision and a new shift in the direction of the company.
• While Microsoft struggled to remain relevant, it’s never struggled to remain profitable.

I’m a big fan of history and business. Combine both of them and you have quite a passion. While researching companies that became multibagger, I had a lot of fun writing a piece on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Apple Computer’s IPO, on how it made its shareholders 205-times their money (not including dividends). My favorite part of the article was the comment section. I loved reading comments on how some got wealthy because they “forgot” they owned Apple. I told myself I would write more of these articles when I had the time. Multibagger is a term popularized by Peter Lynch, author of One Up on Wall-Street and a manager at the Magellan Fund at Fidelity Investments from 1977 to 1990. Peter Lynch often uses the term “10-bagger,” which is when a stock goes up 10 times in value.

Microsoft’s first logo

Now I turned my attention to another iconic company, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). For the new generations of investors, you might not understand some of the obsession the “older” investors have with Microsoft. When Windows 95 came out, geeks were lining up at midnight around the block outside technology stores. Yes people did that for Microsoft too. The Empire State Building was lit in Microsoft’s colors. Microsoft really changed the world for a better place. Microsoft dominated the tech industry and it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. Microsoft is the standard when it comes to massive investing success. You probably heard the saying “I want to find the next Microsoft.” Although it’s slowly getting replaced with “I want to find the next Google.” Of course, Microsoft has been the butt of jokes. Many people associate Microsoft with consumer product flops and the blue screen of death, but despite some its flaws, if it wasn’t for Windows and Office, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

Is there a company that created more millionaires and billionaires (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Charles Simonyi) than Microsoft? It is said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretaries that any other company in the world. I don’t know how accurate those statements are, but there’s no doubt that Microsoft made a lot of people very wealthy, both insiders and outsiders. A 2005 article from the New York Times claims that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000. Early programmers who accepted stock options as part of their compensation became millionaires at a very young age. As for the billionaires, Bill Gates is trying to save the planet with his foundation, Paul Allen owns three pro sports teams, Steve Ballmer owns the LA Clippers, and Charles Simonyi, the guy who oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office, is a space-obsessed billionaire. Here’s another New-York Times article from 1992 on the subject, Microsoft’s Unlikely Millionaires.

Source: Google Finance

If you had the good fortune to have bought 100 shares at the $28 (closing price, assuming you couldn’t get on the IPO), for a total investment of $2,800, today your investment would have mushroomed to 28,800 shares at $57.79 worth more than $1.66 million. That’s a 59,186% return without calculating the dividend. With the dividend reinvested, your returns goes up to $2.5 million for a juicy 89.5% return. If you are one of the lucky ones and happened that you need to calculate your returns, Microsoft was kind enough to provide a calculator to calculate your riches (in Excel, of course).

Microsoft IPO returns calculator in excel.

Assuming you held the stock since the IPO, Microsoft delivered a 791x bagger! You bought it the next day at $28; you would have made 592 times your money without including the dividends. If you guys know of a stock that made its shareholders more money please share.

Thanks for reading, full article at Seeking Alpha

Annual Highlights Politics & Business 2012

You will find The Economist annual business & politics review.

Reposted Highlights from The Economist online’s The world this year

Business
» Apple became the most valuable company ever (in nominal terms), beating the record that Microsoft hit in December 1999. Apple’s share price peaked at $705 before entering bear territory and falling by 25%, to $510; at the start of 2012 it had been $410.

» The most eagerly awaited IPO in years was deemed a flop. Facebook’s shares soon sagged from the price of $38 set on its stockmarket debut; three months later they were under $18 (they have since risen). Critics said Facebook had set the price too high; still, the IPO raised $16 billion for the company and its early backers.

Windows 8 is here

Today is a big day for Microsoft. A sort of “Do or Die” day. In an effort to stay relevant the former monopoly is releasing its latest version of their Windows series. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big push into the mobile/tablet world. The strategy: One OS for all the devices. The goal is to have the same OS on the PC, mobile, tablet, Xbox etc…

It’s weird to see Microsoft as the underdog in this race which is being lead by Apple and Google’s Android system, the OS you can find on the Samsung smartphones. I wouldn’t count out RIM’s blackberry either. Yes the former smartphone king is in survival mode but there’s still an increase in users every month and they have some of the most respected premium technology. A new Blackberry is expected in early 2013. MSFT will try to muscle their way in. They have the cash, the resources, the marketing, the technology and the clout to make it happen. The only thing missing are customers. The OS is a hybrid system, it comes with a touch screen and the good old point and click. A Microsoft made tablet, the Surface, is being launched. Steve Ballmer, the CEO, is planning on selling the tablet for $500. He claims that it’s the only tablet on the market that you can work with. A smartphone too in the product line.

Let the war begin!

Here is a video of Steve Ballmer about Windows 8 and the Surface.
Microsoft's New Look: Windows 8

Google set to past Microsoft in Market Valuation

Google is set to past Microsoft in market valuation. Google’s stock has been on fire since the summer and is trading all-time high while Microsoft has been pretty flat in the last 10 years with a little growth lately. The future of Microsoft is on the shoulders of Windows 8 which is currently being rolled out. I also wouldn’t count MSFT in the long run. They are getting into the hardware with the Surface and a potential phone. Hopes are high with Windows 8 and its push in the tablet/mobile segment.

As of 9:54ET October 1st:

GOOG market cap: $247.29B
MSFT: $249.49B

Comparable market cap:
FB: $48.1B
AAPL: $627.69B (#1 in the world)

Figures in $US and provided by Yahoo

U.S. Stocks Lead the World

Reposted from Bloomberg Businessweek
By Lu Wang and Rita Nazareth

Eight of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value are based in the U.S., up from four in 2007, as 10 quarters of economic expansion and profit growth helped the S&P 500 gain 109 percent since March 2009.

Photo Credits: Bloomberg

Apple and Their Surprise Bag – “The Biggest Product Launch in the History”

Tomorrow on September 12th Apple is set to make another major announcement. Apple loves those. They are great to build up hype and the secrecy of the event certainly gets media and people’s attention. Actually the event is no secret, we just don’t have a clue of what’s going on. They send nice little mysterious invitation and tell you to expect something big. One analyst went to say that this will be the biggest product launch in the history. The recipe has been so successful that other big companies like Microsoft have adopted the practice, like when they announced their new Surface tablet. Let’s see what will the next traffic jam at your local Apple Store.

Announcement time: 10 am Pacific time at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco Wednesday

Now the rumors.