Archive for November 2007

What will save the market ?

As per our earlier post outlining our fears of a market collapse, the situation only gets worse. We could be on the cusp of a market collapse of historical proportions. What can save this market ? I have no idea.

The Facebook has no Face……

As we have been noting since the deal we view the facebook deal as an absolute waste ( besides for PR purposes). As we have stated and will state here again empahtically - Facebook is AOL all over again. There are positive and negative differences of course but the main negative is that unlike AOL where you had actual paying suscribers , Facebook is a game and not a real business. The barriers to entry are minimal.  If its that easy to go from zero to 50 million users ( at $3 per user in revenue)  well its that easy to go right back. Free is free, and if you saw how quickly paying AOL suscribers left ,one can only imagine the ease in which Facebook become meaningless. Facebook is  a mirage of a business with no real model and no real barriers. One can venture to say that Google let MS have Facebook. It only works in their favor. What is mind boggling is that people will say “you dont get it” and talk about 50 million people throwing sheep. To that I suggest have a look ; google it ; when was the last time a sheep throwing business succeeded. yes . it is different. But you get the point.

The Free (or better) Real meaning of Web 2.0

Back in 1999-2001 the web was filled with offers for either free or heavily discounted ( or  if you were a coupon code expert you actually had the store paying you to buy items. ) . Real web experts and pundits noted that this discounting was part of the new business model and was the “new economy ” and that companies needed to “gain eyeballs” and “establish their web brand”. We all know how that turned out ( the biggest loss in all this is that I can no longer make money by buying shampoo on drugstore.com) .That was then. Of course this is now. So What is Now? Well, you no longer can buy items for free but the new free is Software. Lots of software and lots of free software. You can get eveything from something as useful to a free CRM program to something as useless as a Facebook social network. All of course web 2.0.  Which is basically software instead of  soap and Facebook instead of Freepc.com. So if Ajax from drugstore.com was 1.0 then  Ajax from the coolest website is web 2.0. The results will likely be the same. Meanwhile enjoy the free software.

The Sky is not falling: But The Markets will.

Although we usually refrain from specific market commentary ( we leave that for the real street pundits) . We have one observation. Where will future market upside be coming from ? This has been a Fed and news driven market. The Fed looks to be old news and we wonder, with the exception of oil stocks and some housing and consumer confidence upticks where will major good news come from.  This seems like a risky time to be long the market.

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