Liberty

Cuban definitely seems like a smart and business-savvy guy. Just very different from the type of value investing that I feel fits best with my personal strengths. But if I could do what he did and net a cool billion, I would ;)

More Rick Rule for those curious for more:

They sure could get even bigger as a company by going into more hardware, but would it be a good financial decision? How would it impact their margins and their risk/benefit profile? Wouldn't it be better to buy back stock? Or do they have no choice because tablets and smartphones are eating the PC market.. in which case, is their moat being seriously breached? I don't know, but I do know that it's much harder to maintain high margins in hardware than software, and that it's much easier to make shirt-losing mistakes in tangible manufacturing than in writing software if only because everything takes longer and you have to invest more capital to get things going.

There's a video here (the first thing I noticed was the Youtube logo in the right bottom corner): http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx

Vaguely related, the tour of a copper mine in BC:

It's not binary. It's not "everything's perfect" or "close shop". If Apple licensed iOS to other hardware makers but still made and sold its own hardware, there would be suspicion that they could favor their own devices and eventually use their control of the platform to not play fair with their third party hardware makers. Apple doesn't do that, but I've heard about that worry with Google, and now the same is true with Microsoft. The difference is, Android is open source and can be forked, while Windows 8 is closed sourced and entirely proprietary, so it'll probably be a bigger deal.

I always enjoy listening to Rick speak. He's very smart about junior miners and how to think about investing, and I always learn or reinforce something. Wish I had access to the whole speech, but I think that only this excerpt is available for free.

One more thing to consider (via Bloomberg):

From Gizmodo: All the hardware in the world won't matter without a good OS and a nice app ecosystem, though. We'll have to wait and see how that turns out. http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/06/microsoft-surface-2012.jpg

Microsoft sure doesn't time its events as well as Apple. It still hasn't happened at 7:08 on the East Coast? :-\

I'm almost done with this one and can recommend it to those investors who want to improve their game through self-awareness and mental discipline and flexibility.

That's correct, which is why I said I'm glad I don't see things like him :)

Ha, that's always a good one :D Though I believe that Cuban was referring to something different: Since afaik Facebook didn't float the whole company during the IPO but just a fraction, they could have reduced supply without changing the size of the 'pizza'. f.ex. If they have a 100B valuation and float 10% in an IPO, it's not the same as floating 1%. Maybe with 1% there would be an irrational feeding frenzy that would make the stock price stock, but that wouldn't happen with 10%..

I'm glad I don't look at the stockmarket this way :-\ I mean, I'm not saying that he's wrong that often fundamentals are temporarily forgotten by Mr. Market and a stock rockets up because there isn't enough supply to feed the hype, but I couldn't sleep at night if I had to rely on trying to predict mass-psychology to make money..

To know what this means, I think we would need to have more information, such as 30 ships out of how many? how frequent is this situation? is it caused by a one-time event between two parties or by macro factors? etc.

I don't know. That's what might happen, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft never intended for the enterprise to stick with Windows XP for a decade and not upgrade.. It happened because you can do that with perpetual licenses and because Windows Vista sucked so much, but I'm pretty sure that if Windows XP had been followed a few years later by something much better, that many more would have gladly upgraded. I don't think MSFT ever says: "Let's make something that the enterprise segment will hate, we'll do something that works for them in 5-10 years".

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/06/15/household-debt-continued-to-grow-in-first-quarter/ I don't know. We're pretty much where the US was in 2007 afaik.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/final-thoughts-on-windows-8-a-design-disaster/20706 We hear a lot of positive things from MSFT shareholders here, so I thought I'd share something a bit different to avoid confirmation bias. Personally, I haven't tried win 8 so I can't comment, but from screenshots and videos, I would tend to agree with the review when it comes to design/UI. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money, though, but I guess not as much as if it had a better design/UI (those huge ribbons of buttons that take tons of space at the top of apps are truly abominations...).

Here the consumption tax is 15%. I wish it was just 10%...

Well, like I said earlier, there wasn't a war on US soil, i.e. there was no "broken window" to begin with, so at least for the US, this fallacy wouldn't apply. Pearl Harbor damage was insignificant on the scale of WW2, and Hawaii didn't become a formal part of the US until 1959 anyway. But just looking at the outcomes, the US emerged as the only economic superpower, and one of the two overall superpowers. How did the world look prior to that? Japan was an Empire, controlling Korea, Taiwan, half of China, and pretty much most of Far East. German Empire was a huge powerhouse as well. The UK, which also suffered significant WW2 destruction, also was an empire controlling a big chunk of the world. After the WW2 they all had to give up most of their "holdings". All the resources spent for war could have been used for more productive uses, so that's a kind of broken window. And while the destructions of the others allowed the US to dominate more relatively, the whole world including the US might have been better with more peaceful trade between more florishing (rather than destroyed) economies since economic growth isn't a zero-sum game. But we'll never know. It's not as simple as making up an alternative scenario in your mind that sounds plausible; it's just as impossible to create truly realistic alternate histories as it is to predict our future. Maybe Europe and Asia's PPP GDP would have been much higher without WWII, but this doesn't preclude the US's PPP GDP to also have been higher than it is now thanks to better trading partners and move technological progress coming from elsewhere, despite the US not being as big relatively compared to all the others (which isn't what matters -- I'd rather we all have great lives than having an ok life while everybody else is miserable...)

That's how it happened, but as there is no control group, you can't say it wouldn't have happened (maybe even better) without WWII. A lot of things can be impetus for change.

Always good to re-read those. Thanks! :)

Microsoft has just added adds during skype calls for non-paying users. It'll probably chase a lot of them away, though it could help make a bit of money.

http://i.imgur.com/w8aAS.png

I don't know, I hear that a lot, but it sounds like the broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy Some technologies were developed because of the war, and getting women in the workplace certainly helped, but these could have been done without the war, and all the capital that went into blowing stuff up and making bombs could have been used much more productively otherwise. I feel like history has tried to justify the war by saying it was so great for the economy, but I kind of doubt it was actually true. But we'll never know, as there's no control group for history. There's actually something about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy#The_opportunity_cost_of_war But to your point: Yes, some uncertainty doesn't matter too much for the economy in the end, but some certainly does. If you start to lose all the institutions and infrastructure on which businesses depend, then that's a huge problem. Doesn't mean you can't bounce back fast afterwards (ie. Japan), but in theory you could have done much better if you hadn't been bombed back to the stone age in the first place.