The High Tech Industry Is On Fire!

Alibaba. I have admired you from afar for many years now, and never have I felt closer to you than when I visited your booth at the MAGIC fashion conference in Las Vegas earlier this year (although, to be fair, you might want to train your sales people a little bit better because they weren't able to explain to me how the ordering process worked if there were multiple shipments to various locations but under one company, just sayin'.) and now, lo and behold, you have returned my affections! You're thinking about doing an IPO to raise $15-20B, which is no small chunk of change. Should I be scared though? What are you going to do with all that money? I have some loyalties to PayPal, so please don't hedge them out with your digital payments system. I do like though, that you're boosting up Yahoo since they have a large stake in you. So thanks for that. You're really going to be a game-changer-- outsourcing for products and materials will never be the same :)

Here's the requisite "Apple is going into mobile payments" post.

But speaking of Apple, Apple just split their stock which means that they're below the threshold to be included in the DOW. This could be awesome.

But not so awesome? Apparently there was a case awhile ago between a bunch of big tech firms alleging that they were conspiring to regulate hiring between them to drive down wages. Although they've admitted to instating no-hire rules between them, their argument is that it wasn't to drive down wages.  I actually believe this because I feel like they have more to gain by simply respecting each other and not poaching talent than driving down wages. I mean, wages have exploded over the past few years and I don't really see that stopping any time soon, so even if that was their intent, they've failed.

Amazon is still disappointing shareholders, but shareholders are still bullish for some reason. They did hit the diminished forecasts released by analysts, but their international sales are only growing by 18% and with the increase in their prime package, it's hard to say what will happen to their profitability in the future...My gut tells me that they will need to continue raising their prices in order to cover the (pretty luxurious) services that their customers have grown accustomed to. That means higher prime (already done), higher percentages for merchants (done a little bit, to some backlash, but I would expect for it to happen more often and with higher percentages) and a bigger push on their digital streaming stuff (already happening). The real question will come when the merchants aren't willing to pay and the consumers aren't willing to pay. If they're driving away their business by increasing prices, will they still be considered the world's most customer-centric company? Will they still be able to be profitable when they don't have the support of their customers?