May

3

Jim Lackey

REDMOND, Wash. - May 3, 2008 - Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

Paying 5X sales makes sense for a media company? The only other one that baffles me is calling amazon a tech company. The entire techie list is cluttered with either media or commodities, like chips or software that is bundled but offered for free elsewhere.

I am not a techie. Yet I see what the kids are playing with, video. The free MSFT XP downgrade is the joke of the year. Yet I see so many bullish on MSFT, which is wild in the first place, but how in the world did it make sense to buy YHOO? Why did MSFT fail or did they fail in the media/e-mail markets. How can you fail giving things away for free?

I don't have a Linux machine. We still run XP here. I am not anti-MSFT. I notice how many have moved back to XP WM type file systems on many of the sites we use for music and video. Frustrated by the never ending paying/renting of songs, constant reloading of rights for the hand held music players I shut down the Napster. It was great, just sick of it.

I just dug out a box full of old CD's. funny the CD's date from my Army days in 91 until 2002 when file sharing/renting downloads began to work well. Anyways I remember back in 99/2000 ripping CDs to the PC and trying to rename or move files up down load them etc. Oh yea, like back in the 80's making mix tapes.

Hades, I've had my win update off for a while now. So I have media player 9 on this machine. What a breeze. I just went through 25 CDs in a couple of hours, made all sorts of play lists. Its not that its that much easier vs Win NT or 2000 years ago, it's just faster.

So in the past 9 years what has been created? Everything that was dreamed and promised in 1999 is here. Nothing new really, it just works now. Vid-edit file sharing Utube hand helds cell phones, 3g and GPS.

I know "they" say tech stocks have never been a better value. Well that's because there is nothing new. Yes all the toys are better and cheaper. Yet how will they command a premium in the future? Tech traded at 100X earnings a decade ago for today. Today is here. Why are some trading 2-3 times the present for today? Nostalgia pricing?

Yea I understand the branding and all that Jazz. That is why GOOG failed at video and bought U tube. Yet "tech" was futuristic. It was a computing story. A making people lives better story. No doubt there will be some more improvements but the big picture seems to have been played out.

Well one great internet idea left. High speed WiFi the entire country.


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