Intel are placing a great deal of resources in the cloud space and really pinning their future on being the leader and the backbone of it. It's interesting that they've also abandoned their preference to MS and see the smartphone and tablet arena in Android and Apple as where they also want to be. Intel in Laptops, smartphones, tablets - a sort of continuity and consistency appeal don't you think. They are making good traction with many tablet makers and are pushing, as you rightly say, to get into the apple devices. They have major competition though in smartphones from a British firm called ARM who have industry leadership in this space despite no one knowing about them. Also AMD are making some great advances too which will shake up the chip makers if they gain a foothold and win some big partnership contracts.aster wrote:Very interesting info on Intel, forgot about them completely. Especially since we haven't heard much from AMD recently, which usually help raise the question, "where are Intel nowadays?".
Are there any foreseeable dangers for Intel, or do they look fairly bulletproof? I see they're missing out on the iPad, where ironically Samsung manufactures the Apple i5 CPU. I don't suppose Apple is looking at long-term plans at ditching them for its computer range?
Regarding Google, I'm wondering if peoples' feelings about the company will get so negative (personal data collection, storing it, using it, etc.) that people will move away from their search engine even. I recall when Mozilla launched Firefox and how people left not only due to the promise of a better browser, but also because they were sick and tired of MS. Now if Mozilla was to launch a massive campaign aimed and introducing its own search engine, without storing sensitive info about people, possibly without ads, etc., could they do to the Google SE what Firefox did to IE?
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
What's the best thing to do when awaiting a major market crash? I suppose when shares tumble then the USD shoots up, so holding the $ or a currency that will shoot up with it (CHF?) is the way to go? Are any other currencies out there a safe bet in this situation? I suppose the AUD will tumble horrendously when things go haywire in the world, just like it did the last time around...
But my reason for being bullish on Intel is the cloud space. Nothing is ever bulletproof as you know, but they are a good bet and have a great track record of coming back to the table (not always the best first time) with the best product in class.
I think the mozilla thing took off because of microsoft's greed, monopoly and people got genuinely pissed off with their lack of real innovation, unreliability and simply wanted a change. A bit like the conservatives winning the elections - not because people liked them, but because they were a change. But credit to firefox, its a good browser that is thought of highly - as the rankings reflect. There is so much more potential, as you point out, for them to do so much more.
Google and the technology is actually pretty frightening if you think about it. They analyse what you search for, what you write in emails (this freaks alot of people out) and use this to target and tailor all sorts of ads to you. Apparently their technology can index and crawl facebook and find any reference to you on the site - pictures, posts, messages - but it has been blocked by a court injunction. I'm not sure if it's true or not. More likely is that facebook simply write code to prevent google working its algo magic within facebook??!! I'm not sure what to believe so I tend to stick with what is measurable and reasonably predictable!!
I think Google have such a foothold in the search market that anyone wanting to compete will always have to settle for second best - you can still make good dollar being second or third best to google, but overtaking them, I'm not so sure. I think you just associate the internet with google full stop and people assume it is the internet!! They can keep it prominent in new technology by controlling things at the device level also - thus tapping into the youngsters getting their new mobiles at age 4, 6, 10 etc. and automatically seeing google as a browser when you open the internet. From such a young age, nothing else gets a chance. If they dominate the smart phone space, they are locking in a potential endless flow of customers for the longterm.
I think if someone were to try and challenge, the amount of cash they would have to put into the venture would be such a high figure, it really limits the options to those companies with huge cash flow - such as MS with Bing etc.
Do you know something that the rest of us are missing, as you keep mentioning market crashes??!!
If you are bearish on equities in, for example, the U.S, you can sell index call options on say the S&P 500 if you think its going to bomb out. That way you receive a premium that you can leverage into shorting all the stocks in the index if you have enough cash to do that!!
For FX, in a practical context with client orders - you can use forward rates or swaps to lock in your view and thats about as far as I go. I'm not an FX expert by any means so I'm not even pretending to know that space!!
But there is a safeguard of value - that you have surprisingly ignored - in bad times for the U.S dollar - GOLD!!!!
