Thursday, March 19, 2009

May the best one win




<-- That little gem is a 2-year picture of the butt whooping that Amazon.com has laid on Google and the S&P 500. To be fair, Amazon has not exactly been competing with Google but that is about to change, kind of.

Bloomberg is reporting that Sony and Google are teaming up to combat the momentum that Amazon currently possesses with e-book Kindle. Google has access to a lot of titles, which leap frogs Sony ahead of Amazon's library. I'm not sure about the features and functionality on the Sony unit but since that market hates a monopoly, they've got a shot here.

The market also hates expensive single-function devices. Since both are selling over $300 the real volume battle is not going to be waged up here. One of them will cut price big, soon.

By the way, the name of the Sony reader is PRS-700, which is awful. My bet is that Amazon wins this round, then Sony or someone else catches them next upgrade. Maybe a Chinese ODM with a proprietary Google model.

****

MSNBC.com is reporting that swearing at your 401(k) statement is therapeutic. Probably less so if you don't have a job.

The futures are down a little at 5:00 am but Europe opened up so there's hope. The mighty mighty Fed's gigantic balance sheet maneuvers trumped all yesterday and sentiment over the same will win out today. They're going to buy everything except you house, but they'll lower your mortgage interest rate instead. Curiously aggressive.

Have a good one, I need to head down to D.C.

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