The Street is busy handicapping the networking space, and what they’re finding is interesting in part because it demonstrates that stock potential and company sales and influence aren’t always congruent. Sometimes they are, though. One recent Street favorite is Cisco, whose sudden fall from financial grace shook both investors and company management. The result was…
Amazon’s quarter disappointed almost everyone, and the fact that there were so many different views about just what was disappointing makes it all the more challenging to analyze. Many said the profit picture was the problem; Amazon’s margins have been thin historically and the Street wanted proof that they’d fatten up. They didn’t get it. …
Netflix is still smarting from its abortive attempt to raise prices and change its business model by splitting its mail-DVD and streaming activities, or so says the Street pundits. I’m not totally convinced. Yes, I believe that these things did in fact increase customer dissatisfaction and churn, and yes that’s responsible for their larger-than-expected loss. …
Some’s up, some’s down, I guess. That seems to be true with regard to tech signals this morning, anyway. Oracle is buying a CRM cloud player, RightNow, and the Street is reporting issues with hardware sales, both in the service provider and enterprise spaces. The RightNow buy is interesting in a couple of dimensions. First,…
UBS reports that there are some unusual shifts in telecom spending, and I agree if one defines “unusual” as being “atypical to past performance” rather than “without clear cause”. What they’re seeing is a lower-than-usual ramp in capex in the fourth quarter, and a larger shift toward wireless investment. Duh! We have a lower ramp…
We all know that POTS stands for “plain old telephone service”, so POTV should stand for plain old television, I think. Where is it going? Some interesting data on media consumption seems to validate the research and modeling I’ve done on the topic. There’s a pervasive notion that OTT video is killing traditional channelized viewing,…
Our second day of “Big Earnings” week has brought some more interesting developments, from which I hope to draw some interesting conclusions. We have ups and downs, as usual, and that’s pretty much what I had expected to see this quarter. The “secular” or broad market trends are really not driving the bus here; it’s…
Cisco announced that it would support OpenFlow, the protocol that’s sometimes seen as the pathway to an open-source router market that could kill Cisco off. The move only demonstrates how useless it is to read stuff these days! In a neutrality-driven world with no settlement for QoS among ISPs and no regulatory basis for creating…
This week is where economics and tech meet, a week where there are a host of earnings reports for tech companies who are either bellwethers for the market or who are of special interest at the moment because of recent earnings trends. Our fall survey data is far from complete at this point so we…
Google’s numbers for the quarter were very good, beating estimates and highlighting its mobile ad performance, but the company was short on details of how the earnings were derived. My personal view is that Google is doing well with search and still working things out elsewhere. Sure mobile is doing well, but it’s likely that…