It's Official: Google Today Is Just Where Microsoft Was in 1999

Google (GOOG) looks a lot more vulnerable to the accusation that it’s become the new Microsoft (MSFT) today compared to even a year ago.

Several people have said that Google’s co-founders, Larry Pageand Sergey Brin, have sought to build their company so that it wouldn’t make the mistakes that Microsoft did in the 1990s.

Well, surprise, Google today seems a heck of a lot similar to where Microsoft was right in 1999 – the year after Google was founded.

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Why Are Twitter's Revenues So Puny? Time to Grow Up

Twitter is celebrated as a big social media success. The reality is that its current revenues suck.

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Lighting a Fire Under Microsoft

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
5/26/2011 1:45 PM EDT
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I was surprised that David Einhorn spoke out so strongly against Steve Ballmer's leadership of Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Trade Now) yesterday during his presentation at the Ira Sohn Conference.

Einhorn certainly doesn't mind taking poor management to task -- he famously did so with Lehman Brothers and The St. Joe Company(JOE - commentary - Trade Now) -- but he doesn't usually do it for his long investments. He's not an activist investor in the spirit of Carl Icahn or even his friend Bill Ackman.

Maybe it's because he's been a fan of Microsoft for more than five years -- he once famously compared it to Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, a comparison he'll likely want to update after buying part of the Mets today -- and he's frustrated that the stock is flat over that period (not including dividends).

But he certainly came out swinging yesterday, saying that 10 years had been long enough for Ballmer to show his stuff to investors. He also called the senior team at Microsoft "Charlie Brown management."

But I don't believe this is the start of a long activist battle between Einhorn and Ballmer. I don't believe he's considering a proxy fight. Why? Steve Ballmer is not going anywhere until Steve Ballmer is good and ready. This is a guy who owns 4.75% of the entire company. (For comparison's sake, Bill Gates himself owns 7.2% of Microsoft.)

Ballmer is effectively a co-founder. Just as with Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis at Research In Motion (RIMM - commentary - Trade Now), Ballmer has assembled his board. He's sold them on his strategy, and he has their backing.

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Microsoft Should Pay a Fat Dividend

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor07/07/10 - 06:00 AM EDT

Microsoft(MSFT) is currently in the midst of what should be its new dawn as a company.

Bill Gates has left the building. It's Steve Ballmer's show to run the company which is currently in a massive upgrade cycle with a new operating system (Windows 7), and a new Office suite of applications. Yet the stock is going nowhere.

Investors have been waiting for some time for Microsoft to get its act together. They're still waiting. Four years ago, David Einhorn said that buying Microsoft at $23 was like getting Alex Rodriguez for next to nothing in a fantasy league baseball draft. After last week, it's back at $23 again.

There are many things going right for Microsoft and investors are hoping to hear about many of them on the July 22 earnings call. They're hoping to hear good things from Client, Office, the Business divisions and cloud computing, where Microsoft is making strides.

However, investors will have to do their usual holding of the breath to see how Microsoft's Online Services group and Xbox products do. Did Bing gain another 0.2% in the quarter? This is gripping stuff.

On the other hand, with the merciful self-killing of the not-so-hip Kin phone a few weeks ago, don't expect much from Microsoft about their plans on branching away from the PC to mobile-connected devices. No, that's a war being waged between Apple(AAPL),Google's(GOOG) Android software, Research In Motion(RIMM), and to a lesser extent Nokia(NOK).

I never did understand the Kin (although I wasn't the 18 year old in their demographic). The phone was supposed to keep me socially networked to all my friends just like every other phone can do. It looked like a pocket-sized circle, so maybe they thoughts they'd get points for modern art-like innovation.

But the coup de grace -- or so the phone experts at Microsoft thought -- was going to be the way the Kin phone made users dependent on coming back to their PC so they could manipulate all the data like photos, notes and updates that they created on their phones during the day.

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