Reginald,
I own licenses for and use all of the MS products you mention except for Front Page, which IMHO blows chunks. I can do as good a job with a text editor, and when I need specialized stuff like image maps and such, I use WebEdit, a shareware release. I have always preferred Lotus 1-2-3 for speed and ease of use. I have always preferred Ami Pro over Word for ease of use, but Word is speedier. PowerPoint is a good product, and Access is decent. Microsoft's dominance in applications is directly attributable to their marketing prowess and dominance in operating systems. The quality of their products has little if any impact. If Netscape is able to weaken or make moot the need for Windows on the Internet, Microsoft's domination ends. Forever and ever, amen.
Microsoft is fat and lazy. They haven't restructured the company in 3 months, but their hype machine has clearly convinced a lot of people that they have done so.
My trading acumen is as far detached from emotion as it can get. My decision to short this stock was based on:
The fact that the company had hit an all time high;
Was trading near 40 times 4Q earnings when it had historically traded between 28 and 32;
Tech stocks generally taking a beating and MSFT relatively unscathed.
In my opinion, the stock was ripe for shorting, and so far I've been right. So far, with a 50% margin on the trade I'm at about a 12% gain in about three weeks. I am tightening my limit so as to protect my profits, but if the tiniest tidbit of bad news comes along, the stock will get hammered. |
