The government is fond of using taxes and tax benefits to change behavior. Put a big tax on cigarettes and people will smoke less. Put a "gas guzzler" tax on big cars…
Recessions make strange bedfellows. Of all the truly huge businesses in the US, save the oil companies, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Microsoft (MSFT) are having unusually good runs. Yesterday, the CFO of Microsoft…
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has not felt the impact of slower spending. Software must be sitting outside the vortex which is dragging the rest of the economy under. Redmond’s CFO says that the…
It is now plain that part of the reason Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) wants to buy Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is to use its customers as targets for Redmond’s big push into online delivered…
Options trading often shows some key insight on trade bets as far as upcoming events. It appears that at least some options traders may be speculating that a higher bid is coming…
Douglas A. McIntyre Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Apps software, which offers spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation features has signed up 500,000 customers by some accounts. The product is popular because it runs off of Google’s servers,…
According to Reuters, the NABE semiannual Economic Policy Survey show that the subprime crisis and heavy debt are still the biggest threats to the economy. Reuters writes that Microsoft (MSFT) will expand…
No matter how bad the markets were in February, they were worse for some stocks than for others. Shares in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) dropped 16% during the second month of the year,…
Sony’s (NYSE: SNE) PS3 may have a better year in 2008 than it did in 2007. That would not be hard. The game console was beaten like a red-headed mule by the…
No one in Redmond wants to admit this, but Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) new Leopard OS may be getting the better of Vista, at least in enough cases to make it hurt. Almost…
According to Reuters, Paulson believes that the current proposal to help homeowners is too broad and may help speculators. Reuters writes that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has cut the price of Vista to encourage…
As The Wall Street Journal points out, the DJIA is up 6% in a month. That is because, if results from financial firms in the index are backed out, the rest of…
The short interest for stocks traded on the Nasdaq as of February 15 shows that investors made very big bets against telecom and technology stocks. The numbers compare to those on January…
The European Union has fined Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) $1.35 billion for "failing to comply with the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling," according to The Wall Street Journal. Douglas A. McIntyre
Douglas A. McIntyre Yahoo!’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) assets in Asia, a piece of Yahoo Japan and one of China’s Alibaba, are valued at about $11 billion by most analysts. The board and management of Yahoo! should…