Yahoo (YHOO) is getting strong reviews for its new Axis browser. The browser is designed around mobile, and delivered first on Apple's iOS.It's not a Chrome-Explorer-Firefox replacement per se, however. For most browser applications it's an add-on, which mainly makes search easier by giving most results in thumbnails (rather than text links).Economically, it seems to make no sense. Yahoo is taking away ad business from Google (GOOG), perhaps, but it's not bringing money into its own coffers. (OK, I get it. That was the reason so many companies sponsored the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox - to take money from Microsoft.)But this is not the kind of move a struggling company should be making. A struggling company should be looking to make money for itself, not ... Continue reading →
The word from Mr. Warren Buffett (BRK.B) is that he's doubling down on his newspaper holdings, adding papers from Media General (MEG) to his investment in the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and telling all who will listen that they will have to pay and pay and pay to read any news online from now on, or the business will disappear.He also thinks the New York Times (NYT) paywall is a raging success.A word for Mr. Warren Buffett (BRK.A). News has always been free.Oh, and the only reason your WPO investment is afloat? Kaplan. Good news for Berkshire shareholders. The boss has gotten you into the education business, not journalism.That newspaper that dropped on your porch, the one you "paid" for? The payment didn't go to ... Continue reading →
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A lot of people are going to be obsessing today over Hewlett-Packard's(HPQ) decision to lay off about 27,000 people amid slumping profits. Some analysts are actually calling it a bullish signal. HP CEO Meg Whitman Some analysts are fools. Because the layoffs aren't the real bad news. The real bad news is that Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, upon which Hewlett-Packard lavished $10.3 billion just last year, is leaving the company. Even that's not the worst news. "It's not just Mike," one source told the The Guardian, which reported that other executives had left Autonomy. The source said the problem was a "clash of cultures," with Hewlett-Packard's large size conflicting with Autonomy's nimbleness. So Lynch is not just cashing out. He ... Continue reading →
Just before Costco (COST) announced its earnings yesterday, I threw a few thousand dollars at the stock and then enjoyed the pop.In case you didn't hear, earnings beat estimates by two cents a share, but in fact were up 19% to $386 million from a year earlier. (It's always best to analyze retailers based on year-over-year numbers, due to the high seasonality of the space. Apologies if you already knew that.)But I didn't buy for the pop. I bought for the business model.I have shopped at Costco for years, and my late father loved the place. One of my favorite memories of him is his buying a full flat of strawberries and 6 pounds of chocolate so he could make chocolate-covered strawberries for my daughter, ... Continue reading →
FCC chair Julius Genachowski admitted yesterday that the agency is choosing to believe a lie. The lie is that it costs real money to move bits. It doesn't.HowStuffWorks recently looked at real costs, based on a new undersea cable now crossing the Atlantic. Their estimate, which assumes a handsome profit for the cable operator, is 1.9 cents. Per gigabyte. The real cost of streaming a Netflix (NFLX) movie? About five cents.There is an economic argument to be made about Internet traffic, based on congestion. If everyone is trying to use their cable modem at the same time to stream a Netflix movie, then traffic has to slow, because cable Internet is designed as a shared system, a certain amount of bandwidth shared among some hundreds ... Continue reading →
Apple (AAPL) can't replace Steve Jobs, anymore than Alabama could replace Bear Bryant, or UCLA replace John Wooden, or the LA Lakers could Phil Jackson.But if you can combine the founder's best qualities in two people, and put good people around them, maybe you can keep winning. If you have both a good coach and a good general manager, who work well together, you can keep winning.That's what Apple is subtly selling today, with dueling profiles of CEO Tim Cook and designer Jonathan Ive.In a Fortune cover story Cook is described as an operations guy, a lean man obsessive over details, who actually had his own part in Apple's past success. Cook was Jobs' China hand, and he's doubling down on its manufacturing infrastructure there, ... Continue reading →
Google (GOOG) shareholders are celebrating today on news that the verdict is in on Oracle's (ORCL) patent attack and that they were found not to be infringing.But this does not end the matter. Judge William Alsup still has to rule on the copyright portion of the case.And this could be troubling, for both Google and open source in general.The judge has taken the copyright portion of the complaint under advisement, and is expected to rule on that next week. While it's possible he could rule that Google's use of Oracle's Java headers constituted "fair use," that such use was necessary for Google's Dalvik virtual machine to meet the promises Sun had made for the software when it was first written - write it once, run ... Continue reading →
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire -05/23/12)- HP (HPQ) today outlined plans for a multi-year productivity initiative designed to simplify business processes, advance innovation and deliver better results for customers, employees and shareholders. The restructuring is expected to generate annualized savings in the range of $3.0 to $3.5 billion exiting fiscal year 2014, of which the majority will be reinvested back into the company. Enabling investments in people, processes and technology will allow HP to accomplish the restructuring effort and to generate the savings. These moves are expected to yield significant improvements in efficiency and customer service during the next several years. HP expects to use the savings to boost investment in innovation around its three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as ... Continue reading →
