Low returns, safe investment in Tech? No, it’s the dawn of a new golden age

May 30th, 2008

Have tech companies gone blue chip: no risk, little reward?

Over at purveyor of dubious business advice The Wall Street Journal, Mean Street says it is so:

The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.

Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.

The bad news: Tech stocks are the blue chips. Lower risk means lower reward. Are tech investors mentally prepared for the 10% equity return including a 2% dividend

Those are amazing numbers. Tech companies are bigger than banks. Curiously tech - and entertainment and weapon systems - seem to be the only products in which the US is a world leader these days.

Despite the huge market cap of the top tech companies, I think Evan Newmark is off base on the future of tech.

The Google IPO only took place in 2004. The tech market is as dynamic as ever. But there have been changes:

• The movement is away from hardware to software as a service.
• The movement is to profitable online models.
• Online advertising is about to really grow again.
• It's not that there aren't big rewards still out there in tech. It's just that it won't be in selling hardware.

The same thing happened when IBM released the PC, those cute old 286's. I owned one. Suddenly big iron and dumb terminals were of limited use. Companies like DEC hawking terminals and mainframes slowly just disappeared.

We are at the start of a new era of opportunity. The keywords here are:

• linux - open source
• flexibility
• interface
• availability
• low-cost

Anyone who gets those right - and we are multi year clients at least five of these companies (37signals Basecamp, Statcounter, Freshbooks, iContact, all highly recommended plus one legacy with poor service to remain nameless) with the average bill over $50/month - is in for ongoing paycheques. Web applications and commercial refinement for Linux may not be as exciting as multibillion dollar investments in new Silicon factories, Plasma screens or brand new OS's.

But the oceans are a lot deeper here. The opportunites are vast. The plays will be smaller - but clever VC's will have the opportunity to own half of a whole revenue stream which could be tens of millions of dollars per year.

For the moment, the VC's are making their money on acquisitions - and doing very well with the biggest sharks Yahoo, Microsoft and Google - circling in the water at all times. Some acquisitions are huge: YouTube at $1.6 billion (Google), del.icio.us at $7 million (Yahoo). But the current acquisition frenzy is just the top of the iceberg.

We are at the beginning of a paradigm change, of a real tech business renaissance, akin to the launch of MS-DOS in 1981 or the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

Note: This is not to say this tech-media renaissanceis without risk. Those who blow the pricing-access model can lose big in this new era, like the New York Times.

alec | Business | No comments

Trouble with DD Add Signature Plugin

December 29th, 2007

Just when you think you've got technology under control, some small gnat comes along to bit you. I had just added and styled the nice registration form for people interested in Foliopress WYSIWYG and SEO Images to the previous post :

[sniplet signup]

and then I began seeing double. That is to say two me:

dd add signature plugin error

That nice headshot with the articles is created by Alastair Dagon Design's Add Signature Plugin. What's seems to be causing the doublevision is the inclusion of a form inside a post. I tried moving the form into a Sniplet (where it should have been in the first place, quite frankly and reuseable). I've cured a few Wordpress malfunctions by pulling code outside a post and into a Sniplet - but that was pre-Foliopress WYSIWYG. Most of the Wordpress Editors damage or modify code so a Sniplet can stop them from getting a chance to break code. But this time the Sniplet trick didn't work.

I couldn't find the issue in the plugin itself:

wp-content/plugins/dd-add-sig.php

Nor does the issue seem to be in our template index.php file, although there seems to be room for such an issue there.

alec | WordPress | 1 comment

Mambo / Joomla

August 22nd, 2007

Here is the history of Foliovision with Mambo and Joomla. Our first major project in a CMS (as opposed to SSI - server side includes) was a Mambo project. Dr. Ian Firla and I built a monumental mortgage site with what seemed like our bare hands.

Making Mambo work as well for SEO as flat html files was a monumental task, but one at which we were ultimately successful. After careful consideration of how slow and unwieldy Mambo became in production, we made the decision to move to Wordpress (at that point at 1.2 with 1.5 coming soon).

As you can see, we haven't looked back.

But developers are strange creatures. Our CIO who encouraged me to move to Wordpress back then- after inheriting the mortgage site - later decided that he would like to learn some new programming languages. He even suggested we switch over to Ruby on Rails.

That's something I said no to. We are so conversant now in Wordpress, why would we want to use something else?

There is nothing we can't do in Wordpress and PHP is a flexible and quick language. Of course we have to keep our own set of built modules ready but at the end of the day it makes more sense to stay with what we know and what we can easily adapt.

Stay expert!

Thank you Mambo and Joomla. And goodbye. We won't forget you.

But life is easier apart.

1. Mambo Embedded Page Menus

alec | WordPress | No comments