ERICOPOLY

But the gap is closing. Samsung Series 9 only weighs 1/2 pound more than MacBook Air, but has larger screen (or if you go with the one of the same screen size, they actually weigh the same!): http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP900X3A-A03US-features It also reportedly boots 3 seconds faster too (yes, faster than the Apple product): Now we just need to get those lower power chips in there. The Samsung product also shuts down completely (no power use at all) when in "sleep mode" -- saves state to the solid state drive. Then it only takes 3 seconds to power on and restore the state:

Speculation regarding SkyDrive and LiveMesh integration in Windows 8: http://www.windows7news.com/2011/04/04/windows-8-integrate-live-mesh-skydrive/ Those are the current Windows Live services that allow you to store files up in "the cloud". Note that Chris Jones is now Senior VP of the Windows Live group: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/cjones/default.aspx He was responsible for the IE4 effort and was then VP in Windows -- responsible for the UI side of things. So isn't it a bit of a no-brainer that he would be the man to lead the Windows Live integration? Just log into Windows 8 using your Windows Live account -- your files and settings are always with you. You then don't need these laptops with massive storage. Go with a smaller & much faster solid-state drive and put your digital photos on the internet drive.

I believe one of their chief competitive disadvantages at the moment is the laptop battery life issue, and lack of a tablet offering (which isn't really a viable product without advertising a 10 hr battery life). I spent some time today investigating a purchase of a new Windows 7 based laptop to replace my current Vista laptop. I decided to hold off until battery life gets better, and that's just around the corner. Battery life has been my chief complaint with Windows laptops -- it also gets old to have this hot laptop resting on you: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces-first-22nm-3d-trigate-transistors-shipping-in-2h-2011 Windows 8 will also have ARM support -- a guarantee that they can then actually have a viable tablet offering, as you can't sell tablets without suitable battery life. Where would the iPad be today without low power chips?

There are no windfall profits to see here. Move along.

Right, but revenue alone doesn't tell the story clearly. Those are low margin revenues. HPQ made only 16.7% of their operating profits from personal systems group in Q1 FY11. I believe they could make $0 operating profit from that group and they'd still be trading at single digit forward P/E. And you don't have to play "back out the net cash" games because they don't have any.

PCs are only a small part of DELL's business and HPQ's business.

The new era of system stability can be traced back to the introduction of this testing/debugging tool: Driver Verifier: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617

1) Not since I quit in Jan 2008 2) Prior to that I did commute in a vanpool for prior 3.5 years 3) My commute was 2 hr each way (nice to not be driving) 4) Depending on the day, sometimes we had 12 people packed in that van! Normally about 7 This is the program: http://metro.kingcounty.gov/tops/van-car/commutervans.html The county owns the van. We each paid monthy to ride in it (actually my employer paid for it) Dropped off and picked up at the front door of my office building -- no walking from the bus depot (it rains a lot here so this is key).

Xbox actually is a product that young people aren't embarrased to own. That's perhaps the only reason I can think of that would get me to buy a Windows 7 Phone (only Windows Phone 7 will have Xbox LIVE). Could be fun joining in on a game with friends while killing time in the back of the van on the way in to work.

Nope, I was just criticizing the totally unnecessary new requirement of having a Gmail account. It has nothing to do with YouTube, and this kind of behavior is what people once accused Microsoft of doing... which spawned new slogans by rival upstarts such as "Don't Be Evil". Don't be Hypocritical.

How much has Microsoft actually lost on Bing so far? I found somebody else who is saying that Bing is costing billions: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-losing-billions-2011-4 He is counting the costs of the datacenters. The datacenters will be leveraged for hosting software as a service on a subscription basis -- for example, companies who want their Microsoft Exchange services run in Microsoft datacenters (rather than hosting and maintaining their own Exchange servers). These datacenters will also keep on hosting Bing. Microsoft cannot sell hosting services unless it has these datacenters. No? So who is to argue that these operating costs can all be charged for Bing? If so, then the coming hosted subscription app services will be VERY high margin. I mean, because the infrastructure costs are charged 100% to Bing, then those new hosted apps will be extremely profitable as their infrastructure costs will be zero. So... how much does Bing really cost? If you don't build them, they certainly won't come.

Apple also can move on to the hip new thing and drop support for the last thing they sold you. This keeps their R&D costs low (support is a component of R&D). And it allows them to bring fresh architectures without the legacy ball and chain software support. Sound like exactly what corporations want to jump ship for? Nope! I didn't think so either.

http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110418/office-365-hits-public-beta-today-so-microsofts-ron-markezich-gets-seven-questions/ With this you’re making fundamental changes to how a key Microsoft franchise that has brought in billions upon billions of dollars is sold. Can this new model ultimately catch up with and supplant the old one? It’s even more than that. We’ve made a version of Office that anyone can use online for free. But as a business model we see this as something that can be beneficial to Microsoft in a couple of ways. One, every customer that has bought BPOSS, we see their total software spend with Microsoft go up. Even that customer I told you about that saved 50 percent, they still are spending far more than they did before. For one, they were just buying Exchange Client Access Licenses. Now they’re buying Exchange CALs, plus spending some money for the service. Now we don’t make as much profit margin, but we make some profit margin on that. But the biggest reason is that most of the time, they buy other things from Microsoft. They buy new versions of Office, they might be buying Active Directory if they didn’t have it before. They might not have had Sharepoint or Lync, and now they’re buying those. So every one of these customers, we see their total spend with Microsoft go up anywhere from 2 to 6 times what it was before. The other thing is that if you look at the total industry spend, most of it is on activities where there’s no value added. Every dollar you spend on software from Microsoft, you spend $6 trying to get it to do anything. What we’re trying to do is drive that six dollars to zero.

My wife has a hotmail account linked to her YouTube account. Today she got an email from service@youtube.com requiring her to link her YouTube account to a Google account (she doesn't yet have one). "Don't be Evil" How is requiring Youtube account members to shift over to a Google account evil? If you're going to criticize GOOG for being evil, you should go after them on the privacy front. I guess it's a value call.

They might have purchased Washington Mutual if Mohnish had his way (he suggested Bill Nygren manage their cash).

Two obvious points that a moron can understand: 1) Huge expenses from their buildout of datacenters to support their online services, yet not enough revenue from those services to make any money 2) Microsoft will take your money on a subscription basis to host your cloud apps in it's datacenters. Given that the data centers are underutilized and ongoing expenses are already being incurred quarterly, one can imagine the margin on the incremental hosting of the cloud apps, can one not? Sheesh... so they built a whole lot of datacenters that aren't paying for themselves. It will come, it will come...

My wife has a hotmail account linked to her YouTube account. Today she got an email from service@youtube.com requiring her to link her YouTube account to a Google account (she doesn't yet have one). "Don't be Evil"

I read about SQL Azure last year. At some point a lot of those in-house SQL Server databases and .NET apps will be moving to Azure. I think it will end up shrinking a lot of the support staff in IT departments. Some will still be required to deal with sync/network issues between the in-house network and the cloud. It will probably be partially offset by additional hiring on the development/business analysis side. At my office, it's taken them a while to warm up to using the virtual servers, but they have slowly come around to using them. The cloud could be a next step. Something like this may be their first step: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/appliance/

I may not have read every post on this thread... so hope this isn't repeating what others have said. There is a calculator estimating how much revenue Microsoft will be collecting for a given cloud application written for the Windows Azure platform. Click the "launch the calculator" link: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/economics/ The strategy for Azure is to be the cloud operating system. If this wasn't plainly obvious already. So you can have a user with an iPad or Chrome tablet, using it for a business meeting, but if he is running a cloud application that was written for the Azure platform, then he is in effect running a Microsoft operating system 8) I'm counting down the minutes until Azure incorporates Skype functionality somehow. The Server & Tools division is where a lot of growth is going to happen (just my forecast).

Going back to a discussion we had on this board in January, Coca-Cola means "big tobacco" to me now. Their past growth benefitted from a world in which the sources of a growing epidemic of metabolic syndrome had yet to be understood. Will people be willing to consume 64 ounce Cokes thirty years from now? How many board members smoke a pack a day? Smoke even once a week? What would have been the percentage 30 or 40 years ago? Fear not investors, you have made a lot of money as the merchants of death, despite the drop-off of smokers in the USA. Rest assured, you will continue to send a lot of Coke drinkers to an early grave and the opportunity to continue doing so well out into the future exists. It is a "wonderful" business.

I can't remember a time when you needed Windows operating systems to run Office. In fact, I just ordered (yesterday) an iMac for my wife (configured with MS Office pre-loaded). What else (it's not MS Office) has driven corporations to upgrade to Windows 7 desktops instead of to Mac desktops?

Mobile Me costs $99 per year. Microsoft gets $0 presently (no such service yet). So is Windows a mature business that has no growth potential? Perhaps, but perhaps that's just a shell game because the revenue growth will happen in the "online services" division.

What if your per-user purchased software licenses and per-user settings were mirrored in "the cloud"? HKEY-Current-User (or an improved analogue of it) follows you wherever you go. How about at least some of your files being mirrored in "the cloud"? You simply take a folder on your computer that you wish to have mirrored, and tag it with a property to have it mirrored? How much can they charge users for such a service? Or think of something like "MobileMe", but for Windows. There are revenue opportunities here -- more than you get from just selling Windows licenses.

I predict they will look at the combined balances in your 401k/IRA/RothIRA, put it through some sort of annuity calculator, and deduct that amount from your annual Social Security benefits.

So perhaps you just want to know how much you can walk away with if the house price keeps on declining.