Liberty

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/07/us-buffett-gates-idUSTRE7667HS20110707

Forbes on the ancient art of patent trolling: http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/07/microsofts-android-shakedown/ And some discussion of the article at a site full of programmers (it's where I found the link): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738628

Time will tell, but in general having some control over what separates your customers from your products and encouraging an internet with open standards can only be good. And in the same way that search helped make ads more targeted, and thus more valuable, mobiel will make ads more geo-targeted and nicely profitable. Depends how they broke it down. But what matters most is the speed at which that number is growing. They've shown their stats about this at I/O 2011, you can see it in a video on their site. Basically, people search at work when they're at their desk, and then they leave for lunch, and mobile searches spike, and then desktop searches spike again, and then in the evening mobile spikes again. Weekends also show a spike when desktop searches would normally be down. Seems to be very complementary. Totally, but by helping drive the mobile revolution (and having some control over how it's done), it'll pull a lot of ad dollars to mobile advertising. If the capability isn't there, the ad spending won't be. And once they have hundreds of millions of devices running Android, they can figure out new ways to monetize them more (Eric S. said so at the annual meeting). Right now they're more focused on marketshare than anything else in mobile.

You're right, I misread and thought you mean the carriers. My bad. But you were wrong, the money goes to the app maker (70%) and the carrier + payment processors (30%). I'm not sure I trust those numbers (guesstimates from research firms have a habit of turning out to be numbers pulled out of a hat), but there's no doubt that the Android app market is still much smaller than the Apple store. That's because Apple had first mover's advantage, and that headstart kept it much more profitable to publish apps there than anywhere else. But now that Android is selling more than iOS, more and more developers and either moving over or writing for both platforms, so that store should be quite healthy in the future.

I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT did better in mobile than it did so far, but it could also very well to turn out to be the second coming of the Zune. Year zero was 2007, and since then both Google and Apple have shown they can execute. I'm still waiting for MSFT to show that (getting good reviews isn't enough - I don't know a single person who would choose a windows phone over the alternatives). But the fact remains that Google makes money from internet usage, whatever the device, while microsoft makes money from selling OSes and software applications. Google will make cash from Windows phones too, but if MSFT can't sell phones, they might still make nice money from patents, but they'll be irrelevant to consumers and developers, and eventually software can be rewritten around patents or patent reform for software can change the game.

We don't actually know if that's true. Google hasn't reported any definitive profit/loss numbers on Android. Indeed, I don't have any hard numbers. But I think I can still be approximately right.. The more internet-connected devices are out there, the better Google will do. They are very dominant in search on the two biggest platforms (iOS and Android), and devices with full browsers show people sites with google Adsense and Doubleclick ads. They have a terrific brand and even on devices that have other defaults, a large fraction of people will probably switch back to Google.

Thanks, always good to hear from uncle Warren ;D

Either way Microsoft will make tons of profit from this. Indeed, though not as much as Google (directly and indirectly).

Your facts are incorrect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Market#Priced_applications As for the size of the market, I don't have the latest numbers (not sure if they're released), but it's growing quite fast, with over 3 billions apps downloaded. Not at the level of Apple's store, but the trajectory is quite solid.

Handset makers make a lot of money form the Android app market, and Windows Phone is nowhere near that. Also, as long as consumers prefer Android to Windows phone, it'll be worth going with what sells and what has the best developer ecosystem (both for the OS and the apps). 500k Android phones are being activated every single day. How many Windows phones are being activated?

The same thing happened with Google Buzz. As part of Gmail, it was HTTPS. They fixed that with Google+ by first redirecting outbound clicks to a non SSL URL.

Whoa, paying people to use your products? Reminds me of what Bing did for a while... http://www.winbeta.org/?q=news/microsoft-pays-university-250000-adopt-office-365

For an individual yes, but for an index fund or ETF to set this up there would actually be less transaction costs than a low cost index. All they would have to do would be copy every holding/transaction in the S&P 500 (or the Russel, or the Wilshire, or any index they are tracking) except for the airline stocks. Since they omit the airline stocks there would be less stocks and therefore less ongoing friction costs once the fund is set up. Even if it would add just 1% long term, it would be worth it as there is really no extra work once the index is set up. I was thinking about individuals, but yes, if an index was set up, that could work.

He answers that in the interview. ETF rules mean he would have to report his transactions too often and he feels that this would make his funds lose some of their added value.

Apple cares about video calls because it helps them sell iPhones and iPads, so they'll probably interoperate their protocols with Google (hasn't Apple said it'll use open protocols? Can't remember). I doubt Microsoft will open Skype, though, but the free competition will certainly make it harder for them to make money directly with it.

That would definitely be interesting to do, but in the real world, friction costs would probably make this a lot less practical than a low-cost index.

I'm surprised that video calling is just 50% of skype's traffic. Voice calls are a few kb/s (depending on which protocol it uses, between 3 and 10) while video is probably at least an order of magnitude more than that, and even more for high-rez video.

So I did a bit of math and I'm at -7.30% YTD, but I feel very good about everything I own and am buying more of the stuff that went down. Update: And one day later I'm at -4.65%. Things are changing fast these days...

Unfortunately, group video calling isn't available in the free version of skype: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/prices/premium-table-5?intcmp=gvcCS-prem Google+ Hangout will probably benefit from this (up to 10 people in a videocall, all in your browser).

I have Klarman's book (in PDF) and liked it a lot, but didn't learn too much from it because I was already familiar with Graham and Buffett. Always good to refresh your memory, but the Greenblatt book taught me a bunch I didn't know about spinoffs, so that's got to count for something.

Have you looked at his first book, though? I'm in the middle of reading it for the first time after seeing it highly recommended by people like Geoff Gannon and other value bloggers, and there's no magic formula so far in that one. It's all about analyzing spinoffs and merger equity offerings and such. Definitely over the head of the average investor, which is why he's been trying to make it easier and easier with each book, but interesting stuff for most on this forum, I bet.

I'm a bit of a browser geek. Over the years I've used Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, KHTML (on Linux KDE), Lynx, Safari, Opera and Chrome. In my opinion, Chrome is the best browser right now (and not by a small margin), and it has had a beneficial impact on all the others by increasing competition and introducing interesting new ideas to the ecosystem. It also seems to be evolving at the fastest rate, with a lot of under-the-hood improvements being added pretty much monthly. I also still love the comic book they released when it came out and think that was a great way to introduce some technical concepts to non-technical people: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/med_00.html I'd love to see more of that kind of stuff being done..

Thanks for the precisions!

Could you elaborate on why you think he should have stopped? I'm curious to know if you think what he's doing is bad, or if you think it's simply not for you but could work for other people?

Interesting that he says that Ajit doesn't want the CEO job. Wish I had more context, and wonder if it means that he would refuse it, or just that he's fine where he is but would still take it if offered...