Liberty

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.

I'll be surprised if the have more than 12 million in earnings...

I totally agree but it seems to me that, this may be the case b/c maybe the analysts interested in publishing a contrarian view are discouraged by their editors sometimes... I cite the case from "Confidence Game" where the author; Christine Richard said a financial reporter's performance is judged based on how the stock market reacts to their reporting. Also, she mentioned (if I remember correctly) how her request to cover MBIA's faux shell company; Negris Caulis was out right rejected by her editor. Along with that, I think we don't usually get a chance to hear the analysts who are right on the money about a company going down way before it's cool, because they're usually hushed away or the general news consumer isn't interested in listening to them (though I think the case is different for most of the members here). I too would like to see things change; maybe they would if we aligned the interests of the financial reporters with the buyside investors... but here's my guess; once things start to stabilize again (in w/e # of years) and the next bubble gets in the making and market sentiment goes up... once again the best of analysts shall again be ignored... and rinse, repeat. What do you think? I wasn't saying it's always their fault. The system is definitely structured in such a way that their interests are not aligned with most investors (who signs their paycheck? Who do they spend their day hanging out with?). The result is still the same, though.

One thing that bugged me a bit was the part about how analysts and journalists are so critical and always looking for the problems... I wish! Once something is crashing and burning, of course they are, but most of the time they don't dig nearly enough and are way too cozy with management.

Yeah, the battery would be an issue. But they could make the screen black, but when you flip to camera mode, it goes clear for the photograph. They have the technology to do that today, but hiding the battery and circuitry would be difficult around the rest of the phone. But they will do it one day! Heck, if you watch even the newer Star Trek's with Picard, their communicators were bigger than phones today, so technology has come a long way in a decade. Cheers! I'm not saying the laws of physics preclude it forever, just that we won't see it in the iPhone 5 :)

Am I the only one who had never heard of Yammer before this? Good for them for getting a billion, but I'm not sure if MSFT will get its money worth.