[LINK] Oracle & Open Source
steve jenkin
sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au
Sat Aug 5 16:36:45 AEST 2006
Danny Yee wrote on 4/8/06 1:21 PM:
>
> So you should be able to make millions of dollars short selling Red
> Hat shares! Why are you wasting your time posting here?
> (More interestingly, why doesn't Ellison short Red Hat if he really
> thinks it has no future? He has the money to wear the risk.)
Good question - the answer is that the securities and derivatives
markets *don't* support this sort of (bet) investment.
A secondary problem is *timing*. Like a car hitting a wall - it's
inevitable at some point, but predicting the instant is hard. To use
Futures or Options, you have to get the timing right...
[TROLL-free zone follows. Don't read or respond if you're rabidly pro-MSFT]
In 1999 I correctly predicted that MSFT stocks would drop by half -
sometime in the next 2 years. I could not make an advantage of it
because I could not frame the prediction well enough to use the Options
system.
I posed this question publicly in an investment forum and got
dumb-founded looks ... Both for suggesting the capitalists favourite son
could trip or fumble, and there seemed no way to do it.
Current MSFT prediction:
- negative income growth in FY 2007
- commercial crisis in 2010/2011.
Why?
a) FY 2005 results were <10% income growth.
Their rate of increase of profit has been negative for quite some
time now... It should take about 2 years to go below zero.
b) Once MSFT experience negative income growth, a lot of their financial
followers will abandon ship. They will execute a death spiral...
c) This is a classic product lifecycle - but MSFT is at the end of it...
They've saturated the market and their products are being replaced
(with appliances, not other PC O/S).
d) MSFT has *amazing* potential legal liabilities, EULA
non-withstanding, for its poor O/S reliability and shallow security.
If ACCC declared their O/S's fail under the TPA (not merchantable
quality), they're gone - very fast.
[The benchmark is *free* O/S's. If you can't do as well,]
[you should be adopting them as your base.]
It's highly unlikely for (d) to occur.
And MSFT O/S *will* be around for a long time - they have a niche, but
it's more like 12-20% of the market, not 95%.
Robert X. Cringely has a whole 'pulpit' article on the very poor
management at MSF and that they should clean it out or go under:
<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060615.html>
The next article, Cringley says it's too early to predict the demise of
Microsoft (end of article).
<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060629.html>
Quote:
> Right now Microsoft is like a deer in the headlights.
> They are stuck on software and computer stuff. They can't move.
> There are much more interesting growth opportunities out there.
hope this is useful...
sj
> Danny.
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> http://dannyreviews.com/ - over nine hundred book reviews
> http://danny.oz.au/ - civil liberties, travel tales, blog
> ---------------------------------------------------------
--
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~sjenkin
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