Liberty

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...

Thanks for posting this, always great to hear from Charlie. I'd also love full notes if they can be found anywhere.

Thanks for sharing. Good analysis.

I can't predict the future, but Canada's RE market seems to be in an unsustainable place, and we've made a bet against it by renting instead of buying our first house. If the bubble bursts within the next few years, we'll hopefully be able to get a good deal on a house, and if it doesn't, we won't have sacrificed much because our 3bdr apartment is comfortable enough for us (we don't feel we're sacrificing anything by not buying now) and the lower bills leave me more free cash to invest.

Sad to hear :-[

Thanks for sharing, DCG. Crazy that they still don't have a site that works on all platform and with all browsers... That's like web 101. Is there any one who doesn't hate that kind of crap and then feels manipulated? I'm sure they do it because lots of people don't see the fine print and end up making an account before they notice, so they might get some hits, but it's a great way to ruin any goodwill the person might have had...

Interesting post, as always, VAL. I think you might be underestimating Google Apps, though, because we're so used to that model by now. Think of a world where it never came out; would microsoft be doing Office 365? Would the average person be using as many web apps? I think it helped open the door wide for what's happening right now, and I think that giving people exactly what they require to do most of what they need to do was a good strategy. Office software is pretty mature - it's been around for decades - and I doubt that there are many big breakthroughs left to be had except for collaboration, which as you pointed out Google (and the startups it bought) helped make happen. I think if they had offered a completely different interface just for the sake of being different, that would have been a disservice to their users and limited their appeal. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Google Apps does that well; your documents are searchable, available from any computer you have, you always have the latest version of the software and your docs are secured in the cloud (Google has a much better track record than any small user at backing up and preventing security breaches). Before that people were putting their files on USB drives and emailing them to themselves, trying to keep track of versions, losing them in crashes, loading software that takes hundreds of megs of RAM just to write a letter, all of this while their web browser was always open anyway. In fact, many people probably still do that, but I have my important docs in a bookmark folder in my browser. At anytime I can open them with one click from any computer (because Chrome syncs bookmarks too..). Much better than the old model IMHO. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm not sure what I would have done differently...

The way I see it, Microsoft should keep dominating with Office 'power users' for the foreseeable future, but Google has a good opportunity with the vast majority of people who never used more than 5% of the features in Office (and probably couldn't even find most of them in the menus and sub-menus...). Most of the moat around Office was based on two things: 1) Switching costs: If you wanted to try something else, you had to buy one or many licenses for hundreds or thousands of dollars, install it with floppy disks or CDs, and then learn a new interface and retrain your people. 2) Network effect: For the longest time, files saved in one word processor couldn't be opened in another, so it was normal for everybody to standardize on the most popular format. MS changed formats every couple years and kept them as opaque and undocumented as possible to make it as hard as possible to reverse-engineer them. But now... With cloud, apps switching costs are much lower, you can sample the competition with a few clicks. Google has free versions of all its apps, and they have only the most used features so the interface is very intuitive and you basically can start using it right away. It can also open MS Office documents and save files in Office formats, making the network effect less important. So I'm sure Office will be a great business for a while longer, but the moat is eroding, and I doubt they'll keep their margins. While the majority of users of office suite products don't use more features than what's included in Google apps, Google will no doubt keep adding more advanced features as it keeps pushing for more enterprise customers. I think it was smart of GOOG to start downmarket and move up as mindshare builds. It has much more chances of success than coming out with an unproven full-featured office suite and trying to sell it to big corporations for hundreds of dollars per license from the start... Google Docs launched publicly in 2007. Who knows what it'll look like in 2015.

The way I see it, it's more Google that went after Microsoft's core business by creating all these 'Office' apps in the cloud a few years ago, and now Microsoft is trying to play catch up by doing the same. In my day job, we've been doing everything (shared documents, spreadsheets) in Google apps for a few years and it's been working well. I'm curious to see what Microsoft's offering is like, and if it's going to eat into their traditional Office revenue stream because they have to make it cheaper to compete with what is already offered online. I'm also curious to see if microsoft will make it work as well on all platforms and in all browsers or if IE and Windows will be preferred citizens in that ecosystem.

Very little cash. I should probably have more, but I keep seeing things that I like, that are cheap-to-fairly-priced, and that are very well protected on the downside, so I can't resist. This could be one of my main weaknesses as an investor. I have a hard time resisting when I see one of the handful of companies that I like sell cheaply, and I hate making macro predictions, because there are too many variables and it's almost always possible to make plausible-sounding scenarios for the market going up, down, or sideways... What makes me sleep well at night is that I don't invest in cigar butts, so if things go down, chances are I'll see a big paper loss and miss an opportunity to invest at low prices, but I shouldn't see permanent capital losses because I only buy companies with little or no debt and usually substantial cash, a strong balance sheet and earning power, and a proven track record of allocating capital well during downturns. So while I might not have lots of dry powder, the companies I own usually do, so during tough times they could do buybacks, acquisitions, gain marketshare when the competition stumbles, etc. That being said, I've been planning to raise more cash for about 6 months, but I always end up buying something with it before it has a chance to pile up very high... :-\ Anybody else has a similar experience, or is it just me?

That's not what I said. XBOX is quite good, but SONY also dropped the ball somewhat in the same period, so the comparison between XBOX and Playstation isn't the same as Google Search and Bing, because Google isn't going the way of Sony right now. When your competitors shoot themselves in the foot, that has to be taken into account in the calculations...

XBOX is probably right, though that's partly because SONY has been going downhill for a long time and there's no competitor of the caliber of GOOG of AAPL in that field. But to me Bing is a distant second and my experience has been that the quality of results is poorer than with Google (not to mention that it's slower and has fewer features). I also think it looks bad that they've been caught copying results from Google (despite denying it): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

What has Microsoft copied and made better in the past 10 years? Honest question. I can't think of anything...

Indeed, but sometimes they're right...

I also wish they had the whole newspaper articles, but it would probably have been hard to get the rights to them, hence the "fair use" snippets.

Had problem for the past few days, but it seems better right now. It comes and goes...

Down close to 10% YTD, but feeling very comfortable with my portfolio and I'm kind of glad to be down since it means that stuff I like is cheap enough to keep buying.

I've got more ideas than cash right now. About half of my 8 portfolio stocks (my fave businesses right now) are cheap right now (other half are about fairly valued), and I'm getting tempted to add GOOG as a 9th if it keeps going down like that :)

I'd like to second oec2000.

Hi all, I have the impression that Canadian real estate has a good chance of getting into trouble within a few years, and I figure that REITs might be a good place to look for bargains when that happens. Problem is, I don't know much about how to evaluate REITs, so I've decide to try to learn enough so that I'm ready to act if an opportunity presents itself (or I might decide not to touch this stuff once I know more about it). Anyway, I'd love some pointers on what matters when trying to evaluate a REIT, which are the most important metrics. Is it even possible to get a good sense of quality from the numbers, or do you absolutely need to have deep on-the-ground knowledge of the local RE markets in which they operate? At a quick glance I think RioCan and H&R look better than the others I've seen, but I know this doesn't mean much since I don't know if I'm looking at the right things...

Thanks for posting!